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Other books by Sir John Rothenstein include:
THE ARTISTS OF THE EIGHTEEN-NINETIES
BRITISH ARTISTS AND THE WAR (l93l)
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING (1932)
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH PAINTING (lp33)
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CONDER (1938)
AUGUSTUS JOHN (Phaidon British Artists), (1944)
EDWARD BURRA (Penguin Modern Painters), (1945)
MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS: SICKERT TO SMITH (1952)
MODERN
ENGLISH PAINTERS
LEWIS TO MOORE
by
John Rothenstein
DIRECTOR OF THE TATE GALLERY
* *
EYRE & SPOTTISWOODE
London 1956
FOR VINCENT
Par ce que cestoit luy,
par ce que cestoit may.
This book is printed in Great Britain for Eyre & Spottiswoodt (Publishers)
Ltd., 15 Bedford Street, London, W.C.2, by Jarrotd and Sons Ltd!,
Norwich
CONTENTS
Page
Preface be
WYNDHAM LEWIS, b. c. 1884 13
DUNCAN GRANT, b. 1885 44
JAMES DICKSON INNES, 1887-1914 63
L. S. LOWRY, b. 1887 78
PAUL NASH, 1889-1945 92
C. R. W. NEVINSON, 1889-1946 119
EDWARD WADS WORTH, 1889-1949 147
STANLEY SPENCER, b. 1891 164
MARK GERTLER, 1891-1939 200
GILBERT SPENCER, b. 1892 224
JOHN NASH, b. 1893 234
ROY DE MAISTRE, b. 1894 246
BEN NICHOLSON, b. 1894 260
WILLIAM ROBERTS, b. 1895 283
DAVID JONES, b. 1895 289
HENRY MOORE, b. 1898 310
Biographies 329
Index 339
LIST OF PLATES
Plate Facing page
1 WYNDHAM LEWIS. A Battery Shelled 24
The Imperial War Museum, London
2 WYNDHAM LEWIS. Portrait of Edith Sitwell 41
The Tate Gallery, London
3 DUNCAN GRANT. Pour Vous Portrai 44
Coll. the Artist
4 DUNCAN GRANT. Green Tree with Dark Poo 53
Coll. Lady Keynes
5 HENRY LAMB. Portrait ofLytton Strachey 5<5
Coll. Mr.J, L. Behrend
6 J. D. INNES. The Waterfall 73
The Tate Gallery, London
7 L. S. LOWRY. The Football Match 88
Coll. Mrs. H. D. Walston
8 PAUL NASH. Meadow with Copse: Tower Hamlets District 92
Coll. Mr. G. H. Nevill
9 PAUL NASH. Winter Sea 101
Coll. Mrs, Charles Grey
10 PAUL NASH. Landscape of the Megaliths 10,5
The Albright Gallery, Buffalo, U.S.A.
11 PAUL NASH. Landscape of the Vernal Equinox 106
Coll. Her Majesty Queen Efoabeth the Queen Mother
12 C. R. W, NEVINSON. La Patrie 119
Coll. Mr. L.J. Cadbury
13 EDWARD WADS WORTH. Dunkeraue 158
The City Art Gallery, Manchester
14 EDWARD WADSWORTH. Little Western Flower 163
Coll. Mr.J. E. Barton
15 STANLEY SPBNCER. Zacharias and Elizabeth i<58
Coll, Lady Bone
16 STANLEY SPENCER* Self-Portrait 172
The Tate Gallery, London
17 STANLEY SPENCER* The Burghclere Murals: Resurrection of Soldiers 181
The Oratory of All Souls, Burghclere
1 8 STANLEY SPENCER. Cedar Tree, Cwkham 185
Coll Major B. Bcddington Bdhrens
viii MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Plate Facing page
19 MARK: GERTLER. The Artist's Mother 200
The Tate Gallery, London
20 MARK GERTXER. The Roundabout 217
The Ben Uri Gallery, London
21 GILBERT SPENCER. A Cotswold Farm 232
The Tate Gallery, London
22 JOHN NASH. The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble 236
The Tate Gallery, London
23 JOHN NASH. Winter Afternoon 245
The City Art Gallery, Birmingham
24 ROY DE MAISTRE. Crucifixion 249
The City Art Gallery, Leicester
25 ROY DE MAISTRE. Seated Figure 252
Coll. the Artist
26 BEN NICHOLSON. Higher Camstabba Farm 261
Coll Mrs. Elsie Myers
27 BEN NICHOLSON. White relief 1935 280
The Tate Gallery, London
28 WILLIAM ROBERTS. Masks 284
Coll. Count Vanden Heuvel
29 DAVID JONES. Aphrodite in Aulis 293
Private collection
30 DAVID JONES. Vexilla Regis 297
Coll. Mr. H. S. Ede
3 1 HENRY MOORE. Girl reading to a Woman and Child 3 16
Coll. Mrs. H. D. Walston
32 HENRY MOORE. Family Group 325
The Hanover Gallery, London
ERRATA
The dimensions of the pictures reproduced in Plates 4, 12 and 24 should Be-
4, 30x24 in.; 12, 23^x35^ in.; 24, 48x36 in., not as shown in the captions
below the illustrations.
PREFACE
WHEN these two volumes of studies were originally
planned, it was intended to bring the series down to my
younger contemporaries and to include such painters as
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and this intention was advertised
on the dust-jacket of the first volume. But I am grateful to the dis
tinguished painter of my acquaintance who emphasized the difficulty
of maintaining the same perspective in treating of men who have
completed, or have largely completed, their life's work, and men
whose work is both too incomplete and too near; and he urged me
to include no one born later than 1900. To this plan I propose, at
any rate for the present, to adhere. This volume, then, deals with
painters all of whom were born before the turn of the century; like
its predecessor it treats of them in the chronological order of their
birth-dates.
On a later page I shall explain why there is no study here of the
work of such distinguished painters as Ivon Hitchens and Allan
Gwynne-Jones, and why there is, on the contrary, a chapter on
Nevinson. There is one other serious omission about which I cannot
but say a word at once. The present volume contains no essay on
Henry Lamb, although it is enriched with a reproduction of his
Lytton Strachey (Plate 5), one of the best portraits painted in Eng
land in this century. In 1955 I approached Mr. Lamb with a view to
seeking material for a study of him; initially, however, although
most charmingly, he deprecated any such study and in the event
time was pressing and the opportunity passed. But I am conscious
that the absence of any account of him, and particularly of the
portrait that I reproduce, is an impoverishment of my book.
There was a time when the distinction between the painter in oils
and the water-colourist was a rigid one, when, that is to say, a
painting meant a painting in oil and a water-colour, quite strictly, a
water-colour drawing. But the days of such and similar strict
nomenclature are passing, and for my purpose the title of painter
embraces both kinds. Both David Jones and Henry Moore, there
fore, find a place in these studies of English painters.
x MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Henry Moore, the last of my studies, was born some eighteen
months before 1900. 1 need not say that the decision to write only of
men born before this date does not imply that I consider their life's
work to be done, that they are fit objects of study because they are
as good as dead. The inclusion of Henry Moore is enough of itself
to nullify such an implication, and indeed I shall argue that it is in the
most recent years, within the last decade, that his work has developed
most markedly.
Designed as the successor of my first volume, this book carries no
separate Introduction. The general method, too, is the same.
Whereas the groups into which from time to time artists band them
selves turn out to be short-lived and more fortuitous than they at
first seemed to be, the distinctive characteristic of English painters,
as it appears to me, is their extreme and highly developed personality.
In consequence, if I may quote what I wrote in the Preface to the
first volume, the chronological arrangement of these studies is
deliberately intended to emphasize the individuality of their sub
jects by cutting them off from all such fortuitous and ephemeral
groupings.
In one respect my treatment of my subjects is less uneven than it
was in my first volume. At the time of writing none of the painters
whose life and work I discuss was the subject of an adequate bio
graphy; indeed the great majority are still living. And although much
has been written about the work of some of them and little or
nothing about that of others, I found that any attempt to do them
justice meant, in every case, a discussion of their work from its
beginning to its end or to its maturity. In consequence it was
possible for my treatment to be more uniform.
I am under heavy debts, for information and help, for permission
to quote from letters and other sources, for permission to reproduce
pictures. So heavily am I indebted that I cannot fully list all my
obligations. By gracious permission of Her Majesty Queen Eliza
beth the Queen Mother I am able to reproduce Paul Hash's Land
scape of the Vernal Equinox. I wish to thank for their kindness the
custodians of public collections and private owners who have
allowed me to reproduce their pictures. To the artists themselves of
whom I treat and almost all of whom I was able to approach directly
I owe much gratitude for their ready and kindly response to my
PREFACE xi
queries and requests. I am particularly indebted to Mr. Thomas
Balston for his careful and patient assistance in my chapter on Mark
Gertler. A special word of thanks is due to Mrs. Nevinson and to
Mrs. Wadsworth, as also to Miss Kate Lechmere, Mr. John Piper,
Mrs. Grove, and Count Vanden Heuvel.
JOHN ROTHENSTEIN.
Newington.
October 1955.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
b. c. 1884
A PER spending some seventy years on this earth Wyndham
Lewis has not assumed in the slightest degree the colour of
his surroundings. He remains unweathered in our terrestrial
climate; he stands out as harsh and isolated as a new machine in a
field. It should occasion little surprise if research were to establish
that this was the guise in which he first in fact appeared upon our
planet: a defiant and heavily armoured mechanical man newly
descended from Mars. There is a mystery about his beginnings. No
body ever claims kinship with Wyndham Lewis, or to have been at
Rugby with him, and no one seems to be certain where, or when, he
was born. For instance in 'The Art of Wyndham Lewis', 1 a most
careful survey undertaken with his help and approval, it is stated
that he was born in 1884 in Nova Scotia. A few months later, in a
letter to 'The Times', 2 he gave the United States as his birthplace.
Nor has the precise date of his birth been established. It may be that
he has some reason for the strict secrecy about his origins and his
personal life that has always been so conspicuous a feature of his
conduct; however this may be, such an attitude accords very well
with his general sense of his vocation. He believes in the face of the
prevailing adulation of the specialist mind of the scientist, and has
declared it throughout his writings, that the independent critical
mind is still the supreme instrument of research. And he believes that
the functions of a mind of this sort can best be exercised in relative
isolation, and in a posture of candid and aggressive challenge, free,
above all, from any pretension to 'impartiality', that 'scientific
impersonality' which he has always repudiated as treacherous and
unreal In the editorial to the first of the two issues of 'The Enemy', 3
one of several hard-hitting but short-lived periodicals that he has
called into being to advertise his ideas, he dilated upon the advan
tages of isolation.
1 Edited by Charles Handley-Read, 1951. a 9 January 1952.
3 January and September 1927.
14 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
My observations [he wrote- with immediate reference to his own with-
drlwal from the art arena of London-Pans] wdl have no social im-
purTties whatever; there will be nobody widi whom I shall be dining
tomorrow night (of those who come within the scope of my criticism)
wfose susceptibilities, or whose wife's, I have to consider. If the public
is not aware of the advantages it derives from such circumstances as
these it is time it awoke to its true interest. Why does it not exact of
its chosen servants some such social, or unsociable, guarantee?
His conduct of his life, in this respect at all events, has been led in
general accord with his convictions, and to-day there is, among
figures of comparable stature, no figure so isolated as he. Reputations
are made, and to an extent far greater than the public appreciates, by
members of gangs acting in close support of one another. I doubt,
for instance, whether more than a few people are even now aware
how closely-knit an association 'Bloomsbury' was, how untiring its
members were in advertising one another's work and personalities.
Most people who came into casual contact with members of this
gifted circle recall its charm, its candour, its high intelligence; few of
those who were impressed by the openness of mind and the humane
opinions proclaimed by 'The Nation , afterwards "The New
Statesman and Nation, their parish magazine, suspected how ruth
less and businesslike were their methods. They would have been
surprised if they had known of the lengths to which some of these
people-so disarming with their gentle Cambridge voices, their
informal manners, their casual unassuming clothes, their civilized
personal relations with one another -were prepared to go in order
to ruin, utterly, not only the 'reactionary' figures whom they pub
licly denounced, but young painters and writers who showed them
selves too independent to come to terms with the canons observed
by 'Bloomsbury 5 or, more precisely, with the current 'party line*,
which varied from month to month in accordance with what their
leader considered the most 'significant' trends of opinion prevailing
in Paris. If such independence was allied to gifts of an order to pro
voke rivalry, then so much the worse for the artists. And bad for
them it was, for there was nothing in the way of slander and intrigue
to which certain of the 'Bloomsburys' were not willing to descend.
I rarely knew hatreds pursued with so much malevolence over so
many years; against them neither age nor misfortune offered the
WYNDHAM LEWIS 15
slightest protection. One of these days it will be possible to arrive
at a clearer idea of 'Bloomsbury' art criticism by considering it in the
light of the personal relations of certain of its leading members to the
artists whose works came under the notice of 'The Nation' and its
successor; but this, for obvious reasons, is a question that cannot yet
be publicly discussed.
Quite early in his career Lewis clashed sharply with Roger Fry in
circumstances which I will presently relate. Thereafter he was to be
traduced when he could not be ignored. In view of the pervasiveness
of 'Bloomsbury' influence his activities were therefore ignored often.
'There really is no occasion to apologize for a great insistence on this
point', he wrote in an unsigned editorial comment, 1 'not in the Age
of The Great Log-Rollers -for insisting upon the fact that Mr. Lewis
has never yet been rolled by the hand of man. NO ONE HAS EVER ROLLED
MR. LEWIS -who, as well, is not a log, and so does not consort
horizontally with logs and so physically cannot be rolled.' For years,
'by a sneer of hatred, or by a sly Bloomsbury sniff ', these people have
done their worst with the subject of this study; yet it would be unjust
to attribute his isolation solely or even mainly to their activities,
whose power to injure has in any case waned somewhat of late.
There are two more radical sets of causes for it, psychological and
intellectual. Lewis's radical suspicion of his fellow men, his habitual
assumption that almost all men almost all the time are moved solely
by their own interests, and that they are scarcely capable of dis
interested actions or even emotions, which causes him to be ever
vigilantly on guard, does not seriously impair his quality as a private
person as much as might be supposed: he can be an enjoyable com
panion, as willing to listen as to talk, considerate, and polite, some
times to the point of courtliness, and a constant friend. But, although
he happens to be a very interesting individual, Lewis has always
insisted that as artist and thinker he is a public not a private person.
In this role he is certainly more candid, most himself hi fact. His view
of human nature declares itself, in particular in his writings, with
utter candour and repellent power. I remember D. H. Lawrence, on
the only occasion I met him, saying of Lewis's characters *How they
every one of them stink in his nostrils.' That his writings, both in
intention and effect, have been beneficial to his fellow men I am
1 'Enemy Pamphlets: No, i Satire and Fiction*, 1930.
I( 5 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
firmly persuaded, but I doubt whether he regards them with any
positive affection.
Want of affection, however, even when candidly declared, need
not isolate a man. But Lewis adopts no such supine attitude: he is
possessed by a satiric demon of extraordinary power and virulence.
Most men delight in exercising their powers, and Lewis's satiric
demon imperiously demands exercise, both in and out of season.
Consider a random instance from his 'Art of being Ruled'. 1 This
book constitutes the most ferocious and the most shrewdly directed
attack I know upon the falsity and the drabness of the 'revolutionary*
doctrines almost universally accepted to-day. 'Revolutionary politics,
revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest
thing on earth', he says . . . 'Everything is correctly, monotonously,
dishearteningly "revolutionary". What a stupid word! What a stale
fuss/ Immediately afterwards he refers to 'reactionary* journals as
being like breaths of fresh air, worth their weight in gold, and
Catholicism as essential to our health. Yet we turn the page to dis
cover that he has switched the attack from the revolutionary, from
*. . . the detestable crowd of quacks -illumines, cou6ists and psycholo
gists', to those who oppose them. This entertaining vignette of the
'Reactionary* represents him as a figure no wit more attractive than
his scarlet counterpart. 'The "Reactionary", a sort of highly respect
able genteel quack, as well, with military moustaches and an
"aristocratic" bearing,' he writes, 'is even more stupid-if that were
possible-than the "Revolutionary". We listen to him for a moment,
and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme with the muddle-headed
emphasis of a very ferocious sheep/ If any part of the theme of 'The
Art of Being Ruled' were the predicament of the common man
between revolution and reaction this impartial lampooning would
of course be entirely consistent, but that 'revolution' is its target is
obvious from the start.
Lewis is one of those rare beings, among whom Leonardo was
incomparably the greatest, in whom the intellectual and artistic
impulses are of equal intensity. Whenever Lewis writes, however
severely intellectual his subject (and however careless his writing),
he is always the artist as well as the philosopher or critic. As an
artist, as a literary artist especially, he is virulently satirical, liable,
1 1926.
WYNDHAM LEWIS I?
when dwelling upon almost any person, or class of persons, English
men, stockbrokers, women, the rich, as well as revolutionaries and
reactionaries, to envisage them not as intellectual abstractions, but as
artistic creations, that is to say, as satiric creations. As a private
individual, Lewis nourishes no more rancour, I believe, than the
average man; but he satirizes as naturally and as inevitably as G. F.
Watts, for example, ennobled. It need scarcely be said that this
propensity to satire does not endear him to his victims, more
especially when these have had reasons for counting themselves
among his not very numerous friends and benefactors. An intract
able independence of mind, a belief in the value of a detached, un-
compromised status as best suited to the exercise of criticism, an
innate or early acquired secretiveness, a clash with incomparably the
most influential intellectual gang at the outset of his career and an
inveterate tendency to ferocious satire almost as readily directed at
his intimates as at his enemies, are the principal causes for the isolation
of Wyndham Lewis -an isolation for which I can recall no parallel
among his contemporaries of comparable stature. With regard to
his stature there is as yet no sign of an accepted opinion; instead the
widest diversity of view. I have heard several of those few whose
learning and judgment have won them the highest esteem refer to
him, both as painter and writer, in terms of scarcely qualified con
tempt. There are circles who would regard the opinion that his con
tribution to art criticism was not less valuable than that of Fry not
only as ludicrous but in some perhaps not readily definable way as
unpleasant.
There also exists an opposing body of opinion, no doubt con
siderably smaller, but perhaps even more deeply convinced. Included
in the company are Mr. Roy Campbell, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats,
Miss Rebecca West and J. W. N. Sullivan, while Mr. T. S. Eliot
once wrote of him, in a review of his novel 'Tarr*, 'Mr. Lewis is a
magician who compels our interest in himself; he is the most
fascinating personality of our time. ... In the work of Mr, Lewis
we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave
man/
Lewis's command of the written word has freed the visual artist
in. this strange but remarkable prophet from the impulse to preach
with his brush or his drawing pen, and makes it possible to isolate
jg MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
his paintings and drawings from the productions of his typewriter.
But to isolate too rigorously an art that represents only one of the
activities of a being who is as closely integrated as he is versatile
would serve no serious purpose. With him the eye and the intellect
are intimately related, and he himself has never regarded himself as
a pure Visual' or indeed shown much respect for the artist with
pretensions to being a pure visual, with no preoccupations except
form and colour. 'The best artist,' he has written 'is the imperfect
artist. The PERFECT artist, in the sense of "artist" par excellence, and
nothing else, is the dilettante or taster.' 1 The art of Lewis needs to be
considered in a larger context, and above all, it seems to me, in that
of his ideas. The art of painting is probably his first preoccupation,
but the predicament of the artist in the modern world has driven him,
as it has driven other artists of intellect, to a close analysis of the
elements of his situation. There is an obvious parallel in this respect
between Lewis and Ruskin: both, originally concerned almost
exclusively with the arts, ended by taking vast areas of speculation
for their province. At the very outset of his career as a writer Lewis
dealt with the predicament of the serious painters of his generation,
and showed powers of analysis and exposition of a rare order. 2 His
words are as enjoyable and as relevant as they were the day when
they were written. Of how pitiably little art criticism can this be
said! Briefly his argument is that Impressionism involves a disabling
subservience to Nature's 'empiric proportions' and 'usually in
significant arrangements', and is conducive to a new and shallow
academism.
The alternatives he considers are: Cubism, which he shows to be
as closely concerned as impressionism with naturalism, no less
'scientific' in its methods, and which 'tempts the artist to slip back
into facile and sententious formulas, and escape invention*. Futurism,
which is always 'too tyrannically literary, ... too democratic and
subjugated by natural objects, such as Marinctti*s moustache'.
Expressionism-w. which he includes abstraction -which is disabled
by its ambivalent attitude towards the natural world. If you do not
use shapes and colours characteristic of your environment, you will
only use some other characteristic of somebody else's environment,
and certainly no better. And if you wish to escape from this, or from
1 'Blast If, 1914. a Ibid.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 19
any environment at all you soar into the clouds, merely', is how he
states his basic criticism.
Lewis's art and his thinking provide his answer. The first thing to
notice about him is the decisive and consistent externality of his
approach. 'Give me the outside of all things,' he wrote. 'I am a
fanatic for the externality of things.' 1 And, more explicitly, '. . . what
made me, to begin with, a painter, was some propensity for the
exactly defined and also, fanatically it may be, the physical and the
concrete'. 2 Precisely what he was not is defined in some notes on
Kandinsky, whom at the time when he wrote he regarded as the
only purely abstract painter in Europe.
Kandinsky, docile to the intuitive fluctuations of his soul, and anxious
to render his hand and mind elastic and receptive, follows this unreal
entry into its cloud-world out of the material and solid universe. He
allows the Bach-like will that resides in each good artist to be made war
on by the slovenly and wandering spirit. He allows the rigid chambers
of his Brain to become a mystic house haunted by an automatic and
puerile spook, that leaves a delicate trail like a snail. 3
He has always been much preoccupied by the distinction between
the fashionable subjective method used by Kandinsky and Klee, and
by Henry James and James Joyce, and the 'external' method of
which, in our day, he is one of the few exponents. Early in 1939,
discussing 'The Apes of God' with Lewis, I pointed out the traits in
his victims that he had most precisely caught and most grotesquely
parodied. To keep the record straight he occasionally issued a little
formal denial that my identifications were well-founded (as of course
they were), and growing tired, or even perhaps apprehensive of the
turn the conversation had taken (for the air was heavy with threats
of libel actions), he abruptly turned the conversation to the philo
sophy behind the book. No sooner had he begun to expound it than
it was time for me to leave. A few days later there arrived through
the post 'Satire and Fiction', an inscribed copy of the pamphlet he
composed and published concerning the rejection by 'The New
Statesman and Nation* of Mr. Roy Campbell's review of 'The Apes
of God', The author had marked several passages that served to com
plete the exposition which my departure had cut short. As these
1 * Blasting and Bombardiering', 1937, p. <>
2 'Time and Western Man', 1927, p. 129. 3 'Blast II*.
20 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
define something fundamental in Lewis's outlook, and as the pam
phlet is difficult to come by I will transcribe a few sentences from it.
In another book [by Lewis], the outlook, or the philosophy, from
which it derived, was described by me as a 'philosophy of the EYE'. But
in the case of 'The Apes of God* it would be far easier to demonstrate
. . . how the eye has been the organ in the ascendent here.
For 'The Apes of God' it could, I think, quite safely be claimed that
no book has ever been written that has paid more attention to the out
side of people. In it their shells, or pelts, or the language of their bodily
movements, comes first, not last.
In my criticism of 'Ulysses' I laid particular stress on the limitations
of the internal method. As developed in 'Ulysses', it robbed it ... of all
linear properties whatever, considered as a plastic thing~of contour
and definition in fact. In contrast to the jelly-fish that floats in the centre
of the subterranean stream of the 'dark* Unconscious, I much prefer,
for my part, the shield of the tortoise, or the rigid stylistic articulations
of the grasshopper. . . . The ossature is my favourite part of a living
organism, not its intestines.
In the last marked passage he speaks of 'the polished and resistant
surfaces of a great externalist art'.
Near the beginning of the first volume of this work I contrasted
the arguments employed by Mr. R. H. Wilenski and others to make
us believe that the modern movement in the arts is synonymous with
a revival of classicism with the scarcely deniable absence of any
classical characteristics from the art that it actually produced. In a
world which, however classical its patter, had in action so un
mistakably 'declared for Dido against Aeneas and Rome', Lewis is
one of the few artists who makes a serious attempt to carry fashion
able classical theory into practice. That his sympathies are fanatically
classical he has repeatedly stated:
I always think of something very solid, and I believe it is a sensation I
share with many people when the term 'classic' is employed, and of
something very dishevelled, ethereal, misty, when the term 'romantic"
is made use of. All compact of common sense, built squarely upon
Aristotelian premises that make for permanence- some thing of such a
public nature that aU eyes may see it equaUy-something of such a
universal nature that to all times would it appear equal and the same-
such is what the word classic conjures up. But at romantic all that drops
to pieces. There is nothing but a drifting dust . . . which no logical
pattern holds together, . . .*
1 'Men without Art', 1934, pp. 187-8.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 21
The 'classical' [he adds] is liable to incline to be objective rather than
subjective ... to action rather than to dream ... to the sensuous side
rather than the ascetic: to be redolent of common sense rather than
metaphysic ... to lean upon the intellect rather than the bowels and
nerves. 1
I have quoted at some length from the contrast Lewis has drawn
between the classical and romantic attitudes not as a lucid and force
ful restatement of a rather threadbare theme, but as a concise
declaration of his own convictions as an artist.
Lewis regards himself as a classical artist, but this implies no special
degree of discipleship of Raphael, Poussin or Ingres. No slightest
suspicion of revivalism attaches to the classicism of Lewis; he is, for
good and ill, to a degree rare in a man of high intelligence, un
interested in the past. But his claim to classicism is very relative, and
made with a strict qualification. He recognizes that an art that is
impersonal and public can exist in its fullness only when it has an
audience which shares common values, and that no 'highbrow' set
in a great metropolis like London or Paris, still less such enormous,
sprawling proletarianized societies as ours, can for a moment supply
the same order of framework that was forthcoming for the artist of
the Augustan age, or the homogeneous, compact society behind
Dryden, Pope and Swift.
On account of this and other conditions which characterize our
civilization he has declared that 'It would be mere buffoonery, in an
artist of any power among us ... to say "as an artist I am a classicist"/
But however unfavourable the circumstances Lewis has consistently
tried *to be impersonal rather than personal; universal than provin
cial; rational rather than a mere creature of feeling; to act as the
rational animal, man, against the forces of nature', for such, he con
cludes, *is the dramatic role of the classical consciousness*. I have said
enough to give an indication of the character of the strange, tough,
heavily armed and heavily armoured being who seems to have
dropped from nowhere*
I have already referred to an uncertainty about the place where he
first appeared* It seems reasonably certain that this was on the other
1 Ibid,, p. 190.
22 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
side of the Atlantic, and the date somewhere about 1884. It is worth
mentioning that in 1951, in the course of a conversation about other
matters, I asked him a question about his early life, and he refused an
answer saying, 'now that I'm blind and unable to paint, writing is
my only means of support, and my recollections of my own life are
my chief material, and I don't see why I should give away a single
fact; and I don't intend to, to anybody'. He went to Rugby School,
and according to Mr. Handley-Read's book, 1897 and 1898 were
the years he spent there. In 1898 he went to the Slade School, where
he remained for three years. No work of his student years seems
to have survived, but at the Slade are preserved three drawings, one
signed and dated 1902 and two others of similar character. These
proclaim him a draughtsman of no ordinary gifts, content, for the
time being, to accept academic discipline. They are precise, elegant
studies, marked by a reticent yet unmistakable masculine strength
and hardness. The next six years he passed abroad, visiting France,
Germany, Holland and Spain. In his autobiographical writings these
wander-years are treated with characteristic reserve. He spent six
months at the Heimann Academy in Munich, and occupied a studio
in Paris in the rue Delambre. At the Slade, in spite of the hostility of
Tonks, he acquired a firm grasp of drawing; to this invaluable
accomplishment he had added, by the time he returned to England
in 1909, a formidable education, both intellectual and artistic. It is
reasonable to assume that the austere hardness of Spain strengthened
those qualities in himself; how closely he observed certain aspects of
the German character was brilliantly manifest in his novel *Tarr\ It
was his desire to pierce behind the enigmatic facades of the Russian
students he met in Paris, he told me, that first led him to search, in a
long course of reading Russian novels, for the sources of their
arrogant and mystical confidence in their country and themselves.
Little as is known about his years abroad, from the many and
significant allusions to them in his conversation, I believe that it was
largely in the course of his travels that he developed his highly
personal attitude to life.
No example of the considerable quantity of work that he is
believed to have done abroad has apparently survived, but there is
sufficient evidence to show that by 1909 he was also beginning to
evolve a correspondingly personal style as a draughtsman. Whether
WYNDHAM LEWIS 23
because he produced little- which is unlikely-or because he destroyed
much and most of what survived has been lost, examples of the work
of the years immediately following his return to England appear to
be rare. There are, however, several in the Baker Collection in the
Victoria and Albert Museum. His association with the Camden
Town Group, of which he was a foundation member, must have been
due to his friendship with Oilman and personal ties with other
members, and perhaps to his apprehension that the Group was the
most serious and active nucleus of painters in England. Certainly
there was no community of aim between Lewis and his fellow
members, and he played no part in the Group's brief but influential
history. But from 1911, the year of its foundation, dates the earliest
of a fairly extensive group of drawings in which Lewis for the first
time consistently strikes a note that we recognize as unmistakably
his own. For the most part they represent rocklike men and women
standing or seated in landscapes of lunar aridity and harshness. These
massive, primitive persons are depicted sometimes making gestures
of incoherent protest against some malign fate, sometimes in attitudes
of hopeless passivity. The drawings are carried out in varied com
binations of mediums, which include pen and ink, water-colour
washes (often mushroom pink, brown and grey), pencil and chalk.
The artist's preoccupation with these massive incoherent primitives
was intense but not enduring. During the following year, he began
to make drawings of a character afterwards recognized as Vorticist.
The term Vorticist was first used by Ezra Pound in 1913. Lewis was,
inveterately, a theorist, but it was, I think, the sensational impact
of Marinetti, preaching his gospel of Futurism, that first provoked
Lewis to formulate his own counter-gospel and brought out the
inveterate pamphleteer in him. Unlike Surrealism Vorticism was
not a clearly formulated canon, but an expression of Lewis's own
convictions- temporarily adopted by a small group of associates-
promulgated with a violence and pungency which he had learnt
from the Futurists. The movement has often been treated as an
English version of Futurism. Apart from their propaganda tech
niques and the fact that they were both extreme and noisy mani
festations by truculent young men contemptuous of the near past,
above all of an Impressionism that had become a pervasive and bone
less academism, Vorticism had little in common with Futurism; in
24 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
fact the English movement rejected the principal tenets of the
Italian. In 'Notes and Vortices: II', Lewis has given in some detail
his reasons for his inability to accept Futurism. While applauding
the Vivacity and high spirits' of the Italian Futurists he condemns
them as too much theorists and propagandists, as too mechanically
reactive, too impressionistic, and unable to master and keep in place
their ideas. What most repels him is their hysterical insistence upon
ACTION. 'The effervescent Action-Man, of the Futurist imagination,
would never be a first-rate artist', for, he says, 'to produce the best
pictures or books it is possible to make, a man requires all the peace
and continuity that can be obtained in this troubled world, and
nothing short of this will serve'. Finally, he was impatient with the
attempt to represent figures or machines in violent motion, which
was to represent a blurr. Je hais le movement qui dlplace les lignes, he
quoted at Marinetti, when they found themselves over adjacent
washbasins in a London restaurant. There were clashes between
Futurists and Vorticists during Marinetti's visit to London: Lewis,
Gaudier-Brzeska, T. E. Hulme, Edward Wadsworth and others
barracked the Futurist Leader as he delivered a lecture at the Dor6
Gallery in New Bond Street. Lewis used to claim that he owed his
equanimity when subjected to heavy gunfire in Flanders to having
been 'battle trained' by hearing Marinetti imitating on the lecture
platform, with the aid of Richard Nevinson with a drum, the noise
of a bombardment.
One characteristic a number of Lewis's Vorticist drawings do share
with the work of the Futurists is violent action. Among the earliest
of them are the Centauress 1 drawings of 1912, in pen and ink and
water-colour. The centauress herself bears some resemblance to the
primitive figures of Lewis's preceding phase, but the later drawings
bear the stamp of a very different character. The earlier are spon
taneous, and, if the adjective would not be inappropriate to forms so
massive, even sketchy. The later are emphatically deliberate, and
their most conspicuous feature is their angular, rectilinear character*
They clearly have an intimate affinity with the international Cubist
movement. But Lewis was a Cubist with a difference. 'The Cubists,
especially Picasso,' he wrote, 'found their invention upon the posed
model, or the posed Nature-Morte, using these models almost to the
1 Examples in Coll. Charles Handley-Read and the Mayor Gallery.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 25
same extent as the Impressionists/ 1 This practice he repudiates as an
absurdity and a sign of relaxed initiative. According to Lewis the
Cuhists either took apples or mandolins as the basis of their designs
or if, on the other hand, they 'departed from what was under their
eyes, they went back to the academic foundations of their vision,
and reproduced (in however paradoxical a form) an El Greco, a
Buonarotti'. 2 In either case they avoided invention: that was his
contention. This is not the place for an analysis of Cubism, but the
rapid collapse of a movement so brilliantly staffed and which
promised to fufil the highest hopes of the most adventurous painters
of the age for the establishment of a new classical art suggests that
there may have been radical defects in the ideas upon which it was
based. It is characteristic of Lewis that, a self-confessed, indeed an
aggressive revolutionary, he should have subjected the great revolu
tionary movements of his time to the most searching criticism.
When most of his contemporaries had climbed on to the band
wagon and most of his seniors were throwing brickbats (and how
wide of the mark!) Lewis analysed with exemplary independence
the revolutionary tendencies that he most respected.
Lewis's Vorticist drawings were either totally abstract inventions,
such as Planners* of 1913, a pen and ink, crayon and water-colour
drawing, or the designs for Timon of Athens* of 1913-14, in which
he made use of a modified Cubist technique, with a frankness rare
if not unknown among continental Cubists, in order to enhance the
intensity of the representation of an invented scene. For Lewis the
years immediately preceding the war were times of intense and
many-sided activity. During 1913 he carried out four decorative
paintings in oil, in The Cave of the Golden Calf, an intellectual
nightclub run by Mrs. Strindberg, in the Eiffel Tower restaurant,
in the house of Lady Drogheda, 5 and in South Lodge, the house of
Violet Hunt, all of which have been destroyed. This last, according to
my own imprecise recollection, was inferior to most of his Vorticist
drawings known to me. On the very eve of the war Lewis created
two agencies for the propagation of his ideas and the advertisement
1 'Blast IF. 2 'Wyndham Lewis, the Artist', 1939, p. 77.
3 The Mayor Gallery, London.
4 Lewis's first publication, The Cube Press, 1914; a folio containing twenty
drawings, six in colour.
6 Of which a reproduction was published in 'Blast', No. I,
2 g MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
of his activities. These were the Rebel Art Centre, the seat of what
he called 'The Great London Vortex, and the periodical 'Blast'.
The Rebel Art Centre was brought into existence as the result of
his stormy departure from the Omega Workshops, the centre
established in July 1913, at 33 Fitzroy Square, by Roger Fry, where
a group of his friends undertook, in Fry's words,
almost all kinds of decorative design, more particularly those in which
the artist can engage without specialized training in craftsmanship. . . .
Actuated by the same idea of substituting wherever possible the directly
expressive quality of the artist's handling for the deadncss of mechanical
reproduction, they have turned their attention to hand dyeing and have
produced a number of dyed curtains, bedspreads, cushion covers, etc.,
in all of which they employ their power of invention with the utmost
freedom and spontaneity of which they are capable.
In furniture they have not attempted and will probably not attempt
actual execution, but they believe that the sense of proportion and fit
ness and the invention, which are the essential qualities of such design,
can be utilized to create forms expressive of the needs of modern life
with a new simplicity and directness. 1
When Lewis came in one day he was told by Fry that the Omega
had been given 'a wonderful commission' by 'The Daily Mail' to
design and carry out the furnishing and decoration of a Post-
Impressionist room at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and that the
principal tasks were already allocated. 'But you, Lewis,' Fry said
after a moment's reflection, 'might carve an overmantel.' Carving
in the round is not one of Lewis's many talents, and he addressed
himself gloomily to his task. A few days later he happened to meet
P. G. Konody, art critic of 'The Daily Mail' and art adviser to Lord
Rothermere, its proprietor. Konody asked him how the Post-
Impressionist room was shaping, and Lewis told him that, apart from
his languishing overmantel, he knew little about it. 'As the designer
I think you ought to know,' Konody complained, 'The designer*'
Lewis asked. Then Konody told him that he had called to see him at
the Omega Workshops, been told he was out, that Fry had offered
to take a message, and he had asked him to convey to Lewis and
Spencer Gore an invitation from 'The Daily Mail' to design the
Post-Impressionist room.
Talking with me years later about the episode, Lewis said that if
1 From a prospectus, undated, of Omega Workshops Ltd. Artist Decorators.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 27
he had known what protest would cost him he would have kept
silent. But he did not know: so there was an angry interview,
followed by the trailing of a coat, in the form of a letter that may
one day find place in the anthologies of invective. 'The Round
Robin', as Lewis called it, not only charged that 'the Direction of the
Omega Workshops secured the decoration of the Post-Impres
sionist room at the Ideal Home Exhibition by means of a shabby
trick', and that it had suppressed 'information in order to prevent a
member from exhibiting in an exhibition not organized by the
Direction of the Omega', but it attacked the policy of the Omega
and the character of its director.
As to its tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it
very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that
roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the
neck, and its kin of 'greenery-yallery', despite the Post-What-Not
fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and dissent
ing Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern
talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without
which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a
pleasant tea-party, or command more attention.
The reiterated assurances of generosity of dealing and care for art,
cleverly used to stimulate outside interest, have then, we think, been
conspicuously absent from the interior working of the Omega Work
shops. This enterprise seemed to promise, in the opportunities afforded
it by support from the most intellectual quarters, emancipation from
the middleman-shark. But a new form offish in the troubled waters of
Art has been revealed in the meantime, the Pecksniff-shark, a timid but
voracious journalistic monster, unscrupulous, smooth-tongued and,
owing chiefly to its weakness, mischievous.
No longer willing to form part of this unfortunate institution, we the
undersigned have given up our work there.
The circular, which bore the signatures of Frederick Etchclls,
C. J. Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis and E. Wadsworth, was widely
distributed, especially among patrons of the Omega and also sent to
the Press. According to his biographer 1 Fry decided not to take up
the challenge. *No legal verdict,' as he observed, 'would clear his
character or vindicate the Omega/ But he had other means of
visiting his rancour on the principal challenger. Of these he did not
neglect to make unremitting use.
1 Virginia Woolf, 'Roger Fry, a biography', 1940, pp. 193-4,
28 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Brief and unhappy though his experience at the Omega was, it
would seem to have impressed Lewis with the advantages to be
drawn from a centre of the kind. A friendship that he had
formed not long before with Miss Kate Lechrnere gave him the
opportunity of realizing his ambition to control such a centre
himself.
Miss Lechmere he had met at the house of Mrs. R. P. Sevan,
probably in 1912. At a chance meeting a few days later he invited
her gruffly to dinner. Throughout dinner he spoke not a single
word. Over coffee he apologized and explained that he was upset and
distracted by some hysterical letters that he had lately been getting.
But soon he was able to revert to his normal interests. Had she read
Gorki? he inquired; he talked at length about the 'Tales of Edgar
Allen Poe' which he was reading in Baudelaire's translation. Thence
forward they often met.
When he was in the grip of the resentful mood that followed his
departure from the Omega, she wrote to him from Paris to propose
the formation of an atelier, like a French one. So, in the spring of
1914, the Rebel Art Centre was established, where it was intended
that classes, lectures, exhibitions should be held. Premises were taken
in a fine Georgian house, 38 Great Ormond Street, of which the
first floor provided the rooms for the Centre's own operations. The
Rebel Art Centre stirred into full activity the politician in Lewis. He
refused to allow 'membership', in any formal sense, to any of those
who were, for all practical purposes, its members. Of these the chief
were Etchells, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wadsworth, Epstein, Ncvinson,
Roberts, Bomberg, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. At the opening
meeting Nevinson said, 'Let's not have any of these damned women, 1
and Lewis confessed with embarrassment that the Centre was
entirely financed by Miss Lechmere. Nevinson's aversion to women's
participation in public affairs was shared by Lewis, who was in
variably reluctant to admit that the Rebel Art Centre owed its
existence to a woman. Another instance of Lewis's prejudice against
women was his refusal to aUow the artists who, in imitation of the
procedure Mowed at 19 Fitzroy Street, brought their work to be
seen by fnends, to hand round tea. At 19 Fitzroy Street the artists
waited upon their guests; at the Rebel Art Centre this menial task
was strictly reserved to women.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 2p
Unlike many other projects undertaken in 1914 the Rebel Art
Centre was not extinguished by the war; after an existence of some
four months it came to an end, principally because it was unable to
withstand the stresses imposed upon it by the possessiveness and
suspiciousness of Lewis. His conduct of its affairs was audacious and
enterprising, but his suspicion of his associates, his fondness for
intrigue, his uncertain temper, his jealousies and the strains that
inevitably ensued within the Centre, quickly overwhelmed an
institution that his conduct had prevented from acquiring necessary
support. Its activities, effectively publicized, gave it and Lewis much
prominence, but it accomplished little. Ford Madox Hueffer (after
wards Ford) and Marinetti lectured there, but its teaching activities
were restricted, for only two students presented themselves for in
struction: a man who wished to improve the design of gas-brackets
and a lady pornographer. The day came when Miss Lechmere
declined to bear further expense and Lewis moved out.
The most fruitful consequence for Lewis of his connexion with
the Rebel Art Centre was his association with Hulme. Scattered
references to Hulme occur in Lewis's writings: in 'Blasting and
Bombardiering' he is the subject of a chapter. It is there conceded
that he was a remarkable man, with a sensitive and original mind,
but the entertaining and condescending account of this man gives
no hint of the extent to which Lewis is in his debt. 'All the best things
Hulme said about the theory of art/ he claimed, 'were said about
my art'; 1 he refers, too, to the influence of his own pronouncements
upon Hulme, and sums up in the words, 'what he said should be
done, I did. Or it would be more exact to say that I did it, and he
said it.' 2 That Lewis possesses an intellect of immeasurably greater
range and penetration than Hulme is not open to question, yet there
are reasons for thinking that in the association between the two men
it was not Lewis but Hulme who played the dominant part. If Hulme
had spoken and written earlier he would have been one crying in
the wilderness; if later, one uttering commonplaces; but his coming
was providentially timed and the ideas he propounded proved
salutary, energizing and influential. He was neither an original
thinker -there can be scarcely an idea in his writings that he had not
come upon in his reading of Pascal, Sorel, Bergson, Worringer,
1 'Blasting and Bombardiering', p. 106. 2 Ibid.
30 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Lasserre or Husserl-nor an accomplished writer, although there is
something attractive about his forthright muscular style.
At the heart of Hulme's system of ideas was his disbelief in the
perfectibility of man. There are, he held, two prevailing views about
man's nature:
One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance, and the other
that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition
into something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like
a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as
a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the
one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the
classical. 1
I do not propose to follow in any detail the arguments by which
he associates the romanticism of the generations immediately pre
ceding his own with the progressive supersession of classical by
romantic principles in the political and every other sphere of activity
following the triumph of Rousseauism in the French Revolution.
The root of all romanticism was for him this notion that man the
individual is an infinite reservoir of potentialities, and that the
destruction of order, which is oppressive by its very nature, will
release these potentialities and 'progress' inevitably follow. Against
the naturalistic, Vital' art produced by the romanticism of the
modern world he sets up the classical ideal of the archaic Greeks, the
Egyptians, Indians and Byzantines 'where everything tends to be
angular, where curves tend to be hard and geometrical, where the
presentation of the human body, for example, is often entirely non-
vital, and distorted to fit into stiff lines and cubical shapes of various
kinds'. 2 He insisted upon the impulse towards abstraction discernible
in the later works of Cezanne which makes them 'much more akin
to the composition you find in the Byzantine mosaic (of the Empress
Theodora) in Ravenna, than it is to anything which can be found
in the art of the Renaissance'. 3 Abstract art:
exhibits no delight in nature and no striving after vitality. Its forms arc
always what can be described as stiff and Hfeless. The dead form of a
pyramid and the suppression of life in a Byzantine mosaic show that
1 'Speculations, Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art', by T. E.
Hulme, edited by Herbert Read, 1936, p. 117.
2 Ibid., p. 82. 3 Ibid.,p, 101.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 31
behind these arts there must have been an impulse, the direct opposite
of that which finds satisfaction in the naturalism of Greek and Re
naissance art. 1
By far the greater part of the art of his own and the immediately
preceding centuries Hulme regarded as sharing the same naturalistic
and vital impulses as those of Greece and the Renaissance from which
it derived. Hulme was not a diehard concerned to defend or revive
any existing or past social order. Nor was he an enemy of progress,
but he believed on the contrary that the prevailing trust in an in
evitable process called Progress vitiated the creative efforts of the
individual and sacrificed the right of moral judgment. In the words
of his informed and fair-minded biographer Hulme believed that
'the liberal and romantic outlook coloured nearly all political and
philosophic thought in England; and he claimed that this outlook
was mistaken and could be abandoned without any sacrifice of
generosity and intellectual integrity'. 2 Hulme -who was born on
16 September 1883 at Gratton Hall, Endon, Staffordshire, and
educated at the High School, Newcastle-undcr-Lyme and St. John's
College, Cambridge -seems to have begun his brief career as a
writer in 1911 with a series of articles on Bergson in "The New
Age'. The following year 3 there appeared in the same journal five
*Imagist' poems under the heading 'The Complete Poetical Works
of T. E. Hulme'. It was not so much by his writings, however, as by
his talk that Hulme disseminated his ideas, not from the lecture
platform- where both he and Lewis were conspicuously ineffective
-but in cafe, college common-room and at the Rebel Art Centre.
The fact that Hulme expressed himself most persuasively in con
versation and that Lewis published nothing on the philosophy or
criticism of art before the appearance of 'Blast* makes it extremely
difficult to assess with any degree of precision the intellectual relation
ship between Hulme and Lewis. We know that it was shortly after
the influence of the ideas propounded by Hulme began to make
itself felt in London that Lewis's own drawing assumed a geo
metrical, non-vital character. On the other hand we know that on
his own long sojourn on the Continent Lewis observed much and
read much, and Hulme's biographer has told us that *he had become
1 Ibid., p. 85. 2 *T. E, Hulme by Michael Roberts, 1938, p. 12.
3 25 January,
3 2 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
interested in the new geometrical art of Picasso, Wyndham Lewis,
David Bomberg, William Roberts and Jacob Epstein'. 1
What is most likely, I think, to have occurred is that Lewis had
acquired some familiarity with the ideas Hulme propounded-it is
most improbable that a man of his curiosity should have known
nothing of continental philosophical ideas, and he had listened to
Bergson lecturing at the College de France-but that they were
sensibly clarified, vivified and expanded by contact with the more
impressive personality of Hulme. How splendid a head he had is
apparent from the portrait of him Epstein modelled, 2 A combination
of knowledge, conviction, critical sensibility, charm, brilliance,
humour and a sense of fantasy enabled him to dominate any con
versation. 'To hear Hulme develop general ideas and abstractions
was like studying an elaborate pattern whose inner lines and texture
emerge gradually as you gaze.' 3 I myself had the good fortune to
hear at second-hand Hulme's description of a free fight that broke
out in the Ethical Section at the Philosophical Congress held at
Bologna in 1911. In addition Hulme was courageous and extremely
tough. On one occasion when Lewis showed reluctance to continue
a discussion Hulme lifted him up and held him upside-down against
the railings of Soho Square and continued to develop some intricate
theme at leisure. The extreme jealousy that Lewis showed where
Hulme was concerned suggests that he was conscious of his debt to
a man whose greatest capacity was for the stimulation and direction
of the creative faculty in others, whom he regarded somewhat in the
light of mediums. It was certainly in such a light that he regarded
Epstein, who ought, he considered, to carve instead of modelling
and whose carving The Rock Drill may well owe something to
Hulme. Epstein told me that Hulme, tireless in his efforts to inspire
others, was apt to be lazy where his own work was concerned,
assuming that he had a long life before him. In this he erred: he
joined the Honourable Artillery Company shortly after the First
World War began and was killed on 28 September 1917.
For Lewis 1914 was a year more productive and eventful than any
he had known. By the loan of ^100, and an order for fifty copies
1 Michael Roberts, op. at, p. 20.
2 The only cast is still in the possession of the sculptor,
3 'Caravansary and Conversation*, by Richard Curie, 1937,
WYNDHAM LEWIS 33
on behalf of the Rebel Art Centre, Miss Lechmere enabled Lewis to
publish 'Blast', the spectacular periodical which brought Lewis an
ephemeral notoriety. This outsize periodical with the raspberry
cover, and the combative introductory manifesto in huge black type,
was read with eager curiosity, mixed with derision at what was taken
to be the irresponsible extremism of the robust 'blasts' and 'blesses'.
Like so much of Lewis's writing -except for signed contributions by
Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West, some poems and a manifesto
by Ezra Pound and another by Gaudier-Brzeska, and a review by
Wadsworth, almost the whole text was his work-it not only with
stands the assaults of time but flourishes upon the ordeal. Timon of
Athens, 1 a folio of drawings, rectilinear in character, of figures in
energetic movement, also appeared that year. Beyond comparison
his most important achievement of 1914 was the composition of
'Tarr', his first novel and in certain respects his best. It is a work
of extraordinary energy, which uncompromisingly manifests his
'externalist' convictions. It was not published in book form until
four years later. It was in 1914 that he completed his first Portrait of
Ezra Pound. 2 Towards the end of the year he was ill, and on his
recovery in 1915 he joined the army. 8 The Vorticists 4 held their only
exhibition in June, at the Dor6 Gallery, organized by Lewis, who
wrote a 'note' for the catalogue, in which he thus defines the move
ment.
By Vorticism we mean (a) ACTIVITY as opposed to the tasteful PASSI
VITY of Picasso; (b) SIGNIFICANCE as opposed to the dull or anecdotal
character to which the Naturalist is condemned; (c) ESSENTIAL MOVE
MENT and ACTIVITY (such as the energy of a mind) as opposed to the
imitative cinematography, the fuss and hysterics of the Futurists.
In that year appeared the second, and final, number of 'Blast*.
Army training entirely arrested Lewis's activities as draughtsman
and painter during 1916, but he found time to revise 'Tarr', which
appeared month by month in 'The Egoist' -then under the editor
ship of Harriet Weaver, Richard Aldington and Dora Marsden-from
1 Undated but published in 1914. 2 Lost.
3 Lewis has described in 'Blasting and Bombardiering', his first volume of
memoirs, published in 1937, his life during the war and post-war periods.
* The Vorticist exhibitors included Jessie Dismorr, Etchells, Gaudier-Brzcska,
Roberts, Helen Saundcrs, Edward Wadsworth and Lewis. Six other artists, among
them Bomberg, Duncan Grant, Kramer and Ncvinson, were also invited to exhibit.
34 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
April until November the following year. A barren period was
ended by his secondment as a war artist to the Canadian Corps. This
appointment not only released, but stimulated, a flood of creativity.
Besides giving a constantly industrious artist the leisure to draw and
paint, it provided him with a subject to which he responded ardently.
Although vividly conscious of the calamitous character of war, and
of the shallowness of the machine-worship of his Futurist associates,
Lewis was enraptured by the physical splendour of mechanized
warfare. Big guns in particular-he served in the artillery-possessed
the characteristics of hardness, bareness, purposefulness, power and
unqualified masculinity that marked his own temperament. In the
presence of big guns the place of satire is usurped by romance.
Out of their throats [he wrote] had sprung a dramatic flame, they had
roared, they had moved back. You could see them, lighted from their
mouths, as they hurled into the air their great projectiles, and sank back
as they did it. In the middle of the monotonous percussion, which had
never slackened for a moment, the tom-toming of interminable
artillery, for miles around, going on in the darkness l
The sense of romance that this description conveys is present in an
intenser degree though in a less obvious form in his gun paintings.
In these he, who had for so long observed, theorized, experimented,
now emerged as an artist assured, weighty and highly individual
The most considerable are A Battery Position in a Wood* a drawing
of 1918, A Battery Shelled* of 1919 (Plate l), A Canadian Gunpit*
of 1918. These and a number of subsidiary studies well illustrate an
aim which took an increasing hold upon him, that of reducing the
flux of nature to something simpler, more rigid, more tease and
angular. Impersonal figures move like automata at the compulsion
of some irresistible force.
Lewis may be said to have belonged to the international Cubist
movement, but like much else he wore his Cubism with a difference.
His criticism of the Cubists for avoiding creation by organizing their
compositions upon a natural, posed model I have already noticed.
He also criticized them for the triviality of their subjects, for their
failure to attempt the grandness that Cubism almost postulated.
1 'Blasting and Bombardiering\ p, uo.
2 The Imperial War Museum, London,
3 The Imperial War Museum, London.
4 The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 35
'HOWEVER MUSICAL OR VEGETARIAN A MAN MAY BE, HIS LIFE is NOT
SPENT EXCLUSIVELY AMONGST APPLES AND MANDOLINES. Therefore
there is something requiring explanation when he foregathers, in his
paintings, exclusively with these two objects.' 1
Neither reproach is applicable to his own Cubist works. His
abstractions, such as the Planner drawings, are inventions, not based
upon nature, and the Timon of Athens designs and the paintings and
drawings of the First World War represent an attempt to apply
Cubism to subjects of wider scope and deeper human concern. The
chief effect of his service as a war artist was to sharpen a discontent
with the restrictions imposed by pure Cubism. The effect of his
confrontation with a subject so overwhelmingly compelling as the
theatre of war, which, as already noted, had an especial appeal for
him, was to sharpen his sense of the inadequacy of pure Cubism to
express the full content of his vision.
The geometries which had interested me so exclusively before [he
wrote] I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. They were
still as much present to my mind as ever, but submerged in the coloured
vegetation, the flesh and blood, that is life. . . .
There was his programme, and one which he shared with the best
of his contemporaries. No work by Lewis shows the wonderfully
subtle perception of the use of Cubism in defining form of, for
instance, Picasso's Fernme a la Man doline* or FemmeAssise*Dttclizmp 9 $
Nude descending a Staircase* or certain Braques, but he put it at the
service of a wider purpose. Pure Cubism constituted a position
which others, unable to see their way ahead, tacitly abandoned, but
from which Lewis marched out with colours flying.
Lewis's suggestion that he was filling his geometries gives an
inadequate notion of the extraordinary power of expressing natural
forms which he acquired during the latter part of the war. Red Nude , 5
of 1919, for instance is equally powerful whether it is considered as
a design or as a representation--!!! which contempt is curiously fused
with something near to veneration-of a massive standing woman.
What a splendid drawing this is! During these years his powers as a
draughtsman came to maturity, and although he was able to draw
1 'Blast 11'. 2 Coll. Mr. Roland Pcnrose.
s The Tate Gallery, London. 4 Coll Mr. and Mrs. Walker Arensberg.
5 The British Council
36 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
well throughout his life, at no other time did his drawings exhibit
such abounding vitality controlled by so classical a discipline. And
he drew finely with ease, and admirable drawings done round about
nineteen-twenty are not uncommon- drawings of the quality, for
example, of Girl in a Windsor Chair, 1 of 1920, or the Portrait of Ezra
Pound? of the same year. After the early 'twenties his drawing done
from life lost something of its quality as the extraordinarily tense
equilibrium between powerful thrusts -between the force of gravity
and that of muscular effort, between horizontals and verticals -
gradually relaxed. It inclined to become decorative, and lines, though
they charmed by the distinction of their fancy, lost their former
suggestion of stark inevitability. They were no longer lines offeree.
The extent of the process of relaxation can be judged by comparing
with the two drawings just mentioned -which hold their own, in my
opinion, with any drawings made anywhere within a similar range
of years-say, Portrait of the Artist's Wife? of 1936, or with Lynette^
of 1948, in which the forms are loosely defined. Now and again
something of the old energy seerns to revive, but the revival is more
apparent than real, as may be seen by a comparison of the Pound
portrait with Head of Ezra Pound, 5 of 1938, in which, in spite of the
aggressively forceful character of the lines the forms are not defined
with anything approaching the precision of the earlier drawing. No
such relaxation is discernible in his imaginative drawings-power*-
fully evocative, and, in spite of the obvious debts to African,
Oceanian and other primitive arts, highly personal works. From
their black, bristling forms a species of primitive magic emanates.
In the 'forties, however, their forms became more open, and relaxed*
but however weakened they still convey something of the same
potent magic. A characteristic example is What the Sea is like at
Night* which was made as late as 1949 when his sight was seriously
impaired.
I have made it clear that I regard Lewis as one of the first draughts
men of his time, and a word on his methods of drawing would not
be superfluous. Although a visitor to several of his successive studios
1 The City Art Galleries, Manchester, Rutherston Collection,
2 Whereabouts unknown: reproduced in 'Blasting and Bombardiering 1 , facing
3 ColL the Artist. * Coll the Artist. 6 Coll, Mr. Wyndlum T, Vint,
6 ColL Mr, and Mrs. W. Doge Hutchinson.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 37
I have never seen him at work; with the exceptions of his wife and
those who have sat for their portraits I doubt whether more, at the
most, than a very few have been accorded this interesting privilege.
It is possible, nevertheless, to form some notion of his procedure.
Mr. Handley-Read has pondered the available evidence and given
so clear and workmanlike an account of his findings that I cannot
do better than quote from it.
There are no sketches, [he wrote] if a drawing goes wrong it will be
done again, or the faulty area will be cut out, the paper replaced, and
the passage redrawn. There is no scaffolding in pencil . . . there is no
attempt to hide preliminary lines. He draws first of all the horizontal
and vertical lines, which give a firm basis to the structure ... the weight
of the arm rests on the last joint of the little finger which acts as a kind
of ball-bearing runner when the long straight lines are being drawn,
and as a pivot or compass-point for the curves With the addition of
heavier shading the essentials of the drawing are before us ... and then
comes the detail. A little shower of pen strokes, like sun-flower seeds,
is stabbed and scattered. . . - 1
If Lewis was unable to retain intact the extraordinary powers of
drawing that he possessed around 1920, his powers as a painter were
maintained if not increased for the better part of two decades. As
his paintings are rare in comparison with his drawings, it is hardly
possible to trace his development precisely, but a few of the best
were painted on the eve of the Second World War. There is nothing
inconsistent in this divergence: drawing is apt to reflect, with an
immediacy that cannot be disguised, the personality and condition
of the artist; painting, a more calculated procedure, reflects it at
several removes. If ill-health, for instance, affected the delicate adjust
ment between Lewis's hand and eye, any deleterious effect it might
have had upon his drawing could have been offset in his painting
by greater concentration. Lewis's reputation as a painter in oils will
depend upon a small group of works- The chief of these I take to be,
in addition to A Battery Shelled, Bagdad: a panel* of 1927, Portrait of
Edith Sitwell* (Plate 2), painted between 1923 and 1935, The Sur
render of Barcelona* of 1936, Portrait of T. S. Eliot, 6 and Portrait of
Ezra Pound,* both of 1938, and, ranking somewhat below these,
1 *Thc Art of Wyndham Lewis', p. 59, 2 Coll. Mr, A. Zwemmcr.
* The Tate Gallery, London. * The Tate Gallery, London.
5 The Municipal Art Gallery, Durban. 6 The Tate Gallery, London.
3 g MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
The Red Portrait? of 1937, of which the subject is the artist's wife.
These works form a group remarkably consistent in quality and
style; all are conspicuously original. Apart from Bagdad, a near-
abstract by a more adult, more masculine but less lyrical and less
sensitive Klee, all represent persons and events belonging wholly to
the real world, although the Barcelona deals with a subject from
history, and the artist's aim in each case would seem to have been
to evolve forms, colours, compositions, gestures, expressions, all
calculated to represent the essence of each subject with the utmost
force and clarity. Someone-I cannot remember who -once aptly
described his forms as Vaulted and buttressed, fretted and smoothed'.
These metallic forms-hard, reinforced, smooth-curling and polished
-are animated by abrupt, dynamic rhythms. The Portrait of Edith
Sitwell is probably the work in which Lewis most nearly approaches
achieving the breadth, clarity and solidity of classical art. The Pound,
although less noble in conception and less complex in form, is
free from the laboured quality that is just apparent in certain details
of the long-worked earlier portrait. Compare, for instance, the
conventional sheet of paper at her knee with the watch-spring
energy of the papers at his elbow. Both portraits manifest his
prophetic faculty with the same certainty as the best of his writing:
he seems to have discerned in Edith Sitwell the great poet she
became, and in Ezra Pound the victim of some horrible destiny.
The Eliot is a less communicative affair than either of the others; not
a sensitive likeness, for of his strained conscience-hauntcdncss and of
his humour there is no trace, and none of a yet more obvious
characteristic, the grave distinction. As an interpretation of character
it is of little interest, but it is a likeness of a seated man at once tense
and solid, and every part of its tightly integrated complex of forms
sculptured as if out of some hard material holds the attention. In
one respect the artist has registered a success of a specifically con
temporary order. During the past century artists have combed the
surface of the world-some have even dredged its depths-for objects
in themselves unattractive from which they might distil some element
of beauty. Barely two centuries ago beauty was held to be restricted
to a narrow range of subjects, and only since then have the whole
contents of the world (including man's dreams and the unccnsorcd
1 Coll. Mrs. Eva Handley-Read.
WYNDHAM LEWIS 39
contents of his unconscious mind) been regarded as proper subjects
for a work of art. This inclusiveness was an inevitable conse
quence of the growth of the belief that beauty resides not in any
subject but in the eye of the beholder. It has long seemed to me-
and the notion is strengthened in me by every visit to an exhibition
of contemporary portraits -that of all the vast variety of products
of our industrial civilization the most refractory to treatment by
painter or sculptor is the lounge suit. I know of no lounge suit, cer
tainly no new smart lounge suit, that has been transformed- without
loss of verisimilitude-into a seemlier, indeed a nobler object than
the one worn by Mr. Eliot in Lewis's portrait of him. Such a trans
formation called for the exercise of exceptional artistic power, and
deep insight into the character of our shabby civilization.
Lewis often speaks as though the relative fewness of the paintings
he has produced is due to the particular circumstances of the age,
which compel the original artist to dissipate his energies in defending
and justifying his creations by articles, pamphlets and the like, and in
painting 'pot-boilers' to enable him to afford to undertake his serious
projects. The circumstances he has had in mind are certainly not the
products of his fancy. They are real enough, but I think he exag
gerates their special relevance for himself. Most of the original
painters of his time have written little or nothing in justification of
their work; when they have written at all, it has more often than not
been in response to pressure from an enterprising publisher. Con
temporary painting, with its repudiation of traditions and of the
reality perceptible to the average eye, has indeed brought into being
a vast expository literature, but this is pre-eminently the work of
professional art critics and art historians. Had Lewis not been so apt
to show himself mistrustful towards those who have written about
his work, and on occasion dictatorial, it would have found effective
advocates, and relieved him of any obligation to take up the pen in
his own defence. In one sense such advocates might well have been
more effective than he: effective in the sense of winning sympathy
and patronage for his painting. But in another sense he was his own
most effective advocate.
Upon appropriate provocation, armed and armoured like some
massive tank, he would roll into action, and the opponents would
be crushed beneath the vehicle's steel tracks, would be withered by
40 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
blasts of heavy dialectical gunfire and suffer final agonies from his
secondary armament of satiric invective. I have met no polemical
engine more deadly in all English literature; it seems to me to sur
pass even that of Swift. Magnificent, but it enabled him to win only
Pyrrhic victories. A society with higher literary than pictorial
traditions was quick to accord him recognition-although in my
opinion not adequate recognition- as a writer; but this recognition
was astutely used to disparage his painting. Nobody that I know of
has suffered death from invective; every one of Lewis's mangled
enemies lived to fight-mostly from secure ambush-in other days.
The modicum of respect and the harvest of resentment his polemical
writings reaped won him few friends and fewer patrons.
Of 'pot-boiling* Lewis has never made any success. Considering
that a formidable, even a menacing character marks his best painting
and drawing, a deliberate attempt to ingratiate involved a filleting
process which could result only in the eUmination of the very
qualities for which his work is most to be valued.
In the preceding pages there will have been afforded some
explanation of why, in an age in general so ready to recognize merit,
there is so little disposition to concur in Mr. T. S. Eliot's opinion, that
Lewis is 'the most fascinating personality of our time'. For myself,
I am convinced that the 'mists of winter' which in 1951 thickened
into an impenetrable fog before the eyes of Lewis ended the career
of a painter and draughtsman whose best work will stand beside the
best done in his time. It is in the best sense masculine and positive,
the product of one who acts, not, like most contemporary art, of one
to whom things merely happen, of one who looks arrogantly for
ward without nostalgic glances backward, one who -if humanity by
a miracle escapes a third world war-may be looked back upon as
a great primitive of a nobler, clearer and more rational way of
seeing.
Lewis has lived a continuously industrious life; and has produced
a phenomenal volume of work of a variety unsurpassed by any
Englishman of his time. In addition to his paintings and drawings he
has produced volumes of satire, philosophy, art and literary criticism,
contemporary history and three volumes of autobiography,
Lewis is among the most articulate men of his generation and,
with the full realization of the difficulties opposed by the traditionless
WYNDHAM LEWIS 41
character of his age to such a programme, it has been his constant
endeavour to address himself, in all his work, to a public as wide as
is consistent with a fair measure of responsibility. Although there
fore in this respect he has nothing in common with such 'iceberg*
men as Acton, who published no more than a small fraction of his
speculations and researches, or the philosopher Wittgenstein; none
the less, there is a private Lewis not readily perceptible in his work.
In the Introduction which prefaces the first volume of these studies
I stated my belief that there is a sense in which the artist transcends
his work, and that it is difficult to think of any fact about an artist,
or of any circumstances of his life, that might not have an effect
upon his work. From this belief I was led to the conclusion that an
obligation falls upon those to whom has fallen the privilege of know
ing artists to place on record something about their personalities and
their opinions.
The seriously held opinions of Lewis I would suppose to be fully
elaborated in his writings, and less explicitly in his painting and
drawing. But his works, designed to express his opinions with the
utmost clarity and the utmost pungency, also act as masks for his
private personality. In consequence I have treated, in the course of
this study, almost exclusively with the public personality. By way
of discharging the obligation to which I just now referred I propose
to conclude by a few comments on the man not easily discernible
in the work of the artist. This man is an eccentric, whose attitude
towards the surrounding world is political and, to an extraordinary
degree, defensive. He is actuated, I believe, by an overmastering
impulse to record, in all its aggressive sharpness, the vision of his
outward and his inward eye, his prophet's apprehension of the real
and the false. It is the case that the antagonism of 'Bloornsbury* and
the British aversion for what is stark, uncompromising and trucu
lently stated have exposed him to hostility and criticism; but both
have done so in far smaller measure than he habitually assumes.
Suspicion and trigger happiness with his armament of satire have
done more to isolate him than the nature of his opinions, or even
the manner in which they have been proclaimed. However that may
be, his habitual attitude is one of mdHtant resistance to impending
martyrdom. At restaurants he insists upon sitting with his back to a
wall. At Adam and Eve Mews, where he lived when I knew him
42 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
first in the early 'twenties, his rear was secured by a high wall; at
29A Kensington Gardens Studios, Netting Hill Gate, where he has
mostly lived during recent years, the narrow many-cornered
approach, leading eventually to an inner fastness, might have been
constructed with a professional eye to defence. To the sequestered
and fortress-Hke character of the places where he has lived is added
an extraordinary secretiveness, as an elaborate security measure. Not
for years after his marriage, for instance, did he admit to the existence
of his wife. It was probably during 1938 or 1939 that I had dinner
with him at Kensington Gardens Studios. Dinner was elaborate and
the studio impeccably tidy. I was reminded of the earlier occasion,
when I had been entertained by my host. Then we had sat on pack
ing-cases in front of a red-hot iron stove, from whose angry rays
we must have suffered painfully had we not been shielded by a yard-
high range of cinders encircling the fearful source of heat. Only a
feminine hand, I reflected, and a feminine hand of more than usual
authority could so have transformed the environment of so formid
able a man. Suddenly I knew that Mrs. Lewis-of whose existence
I had vaguely heard-was somewhere present, concealed somewhere
in the tiny studio flat. Not long afterwards, during the winter of
1939, on a visit to the United States, I met Lewis in New York and
Buffalo. In the latter city he introduced me to his wife, and proposed
that they should spend Christmas at the house of my wife's parents
in Lexington, Kentucky. My wife wrote gently reproaching Lewis
for having neglected to bring his wife to our house in London,
where he himself had been a visitor from time to time. In a long and
regrettably lost reply he wrote that the Romans were never accom
panied by their wives on their campaigns but that the Gauls and
other barbarians sometimes were, and that he varied his own practice
in accordance with the exigencies of the campaign upon which lie
was engaged. In Europe therefore he followed the Roman fashion;
in America, the Gallic, sometimes even, he concluded, actually riding
into battle with his wife. To our regret, the exigencies of a campaign
of wider scope impeded our reunion in Kentucky*
I recall a characteristic circumstance of his last visit, just before
the war, to our London house. Lewis having accepted an invitation
to dinner at short notice, niy wife then telephoned to Margaret Nash
to ask her and Paul to dine with us also* * We should love to conic/
WYNDHAM LEWIS 43
Margaret Nash said, love to.' 'By the way,' said my wife, 'Wynd-
ham Lewis is coming.' 'Oh, Wyndham Lewis? Just a moment, I
must speak to Paul.' And then, a few moments later, Tm sorry, but
Paul's asthma is bad to-night, and besides- Wyndham Lewis-Paul
doesn't feel inclined. There were some letters, and Paul has not been
very well since.' That night my wife asked Lewis what he had done
to offend Paul Nash. 'No thing at all,' Lewis answered. 'Paul is a real
pro. One of the few we've got in England. I'd not dream of doing
anything to Paul. Besides, I've not seen him for months.' 'Nor written
to him?' 'Not that I can remember/
'Margaret Nash seemed to think you had.'
'Now I do remember writing him a letter-Paul and I had a
trifling difference as a matter of fact.'
'And you wrote him a letter? Surely you did more than that?'
'It comes back to me now. After this difference I wrote to Paul.
He didn't answer. I wrote again, and again no answer, so I wrote
to him every day.'
'How long did your difference last?'
'Nearly three weeks.'
'And how did the matter end?'
'With a letter from Paul's solicitor explaining that his doctor
wished our correspondence to cease.'
DUNCAN GRANT
b. 1885
A' anonymous reviewer of the first volume of these studies
took me to task for referring to my own relationship with
their subjects. Writers who treat of contemporary subjects
work under manifest disadvantages: they are likely to be ignorant
of relevant documents, documents of the kind which come to light
only after a lapse of time, and they find the utmost difficulty in seeing
persons and events in their just proportion, which for those who
write later is relatively easy. It may justly be objected in fact that the
contemporary historian 'cannot see the wood for the trees'. But he
does have opportunities of observing the trees, and since these
studies are, so to speak, about trees rather than about woods, I regard
it as useful on occasion to make clear in what circumstances I have
made my own observations. Biographies of artists are apt to contain
accounts of events and alleged sayings which arc of little value simply
because nothing is known of their origin: whether they come from
friends or enemies, or whether they are hearsay or else fabrications.
Therefore the writer who is able to say, 1 heard the artist say this',
or 'I saw that', may be making a contribution, however modest, to
the sum of facts out of which history is made. It also follows that the
possible value of a fact will be enhanced if something is known of the
relation of the observer to the observed. The anonymous reviewer,
in any case, took a naive view of the question of detachment. He
chose to forget that there exists no such quality as perfect detachment,
All writers worth reading have an attitude towards their subject,
and the more plainly this attitude is manifest the less likely are they
to deceive. If the reader knows where a writer stands, he will be able
to make the necessary allowance for his bias. The deceiver is he who
claims, explicitly or by his manner, a detachment that he cannot
possess. What malevolence, on the other hand, may be masked from
the casual reader of certain learned journals by a bland manner,
numerous footnotes, meticulous citation of authorities!
I have chosen to preface my study of Duncan Grant with these
44
3, DUNCAN GRANT. Pour VousPortrait (1930).
Oil, 34x39 in, Coll, the Artist,
DUNCAN GRANT 45
general observations because I do in fact stand in a particular relation
to the society of which this artist is a central figure. It is a relation
that I have, quite simply, inherited. Following the resounding
success of 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists', that is to say the so-
called 'first' Post-Impressionist exhibition organized by Roger Fry
at the Grafton Galleries in November 1910, the directors offered him
the control of their galleries during the autumn months. This oppor
tunity Fry hoped to use to bring together all the serious tendencies
in English painting and to show them side by side with French,
which, if successful, might, in the words of his biographer, 'unite
groups; destroy coteries and bring the English into touch with
European art'. 1 In pursuance of this aim he wrote several letters to
my father giving at some length his reasons for his belief in the
fruitfulness of the projected exhibition and appealing urgently to
my father to participate. In spite of his admiration for Fry's wide
knowledge, the perennial freshness of his outlook and his gifts of
lucid and persuasive exposition, he decided, for reasons already
briefly noted, to refuse. 2 Fry regarded this refusal as a betrayal of the
progressive forces in English painting by a friend whose place was
in their ranks. He never forgave my father, and he communicated
his rancour to a wide circle of the Bloomsbury group. Not only
were the most venomous attacks made on any artist of the time
made on my father in the columns of 'The New Statesman and
Nation', but I myself, years later, was, in one way and another,
made aware of Bloomsbury hostility.
If there should be an armVlength character or any want of fair
ness in my treatment of any member of 'Bloomsbury', it will be
due to a constraint in my relations with them of which I shall have
given a summary indication of the cause. Let me, however, make
unequivocally clear that, so far as I am aware, Grant has never
associated himself with the vendettas and intrigues so ruthlessly
pursued by certain of his friends, or indeed been actively concerned
with art politics of any kind.
Fear has stamped my first meeting with Grant vividly upon my
memory. One hot afternoon in the summer of 1922 I found myself
with two companions, likewise Oxford undergraduates, in a house
1 *R.oger Fry; a biography', by Virginia Woolf, 1940, pp. 165-6.
2 'Modem English Painters. Sickert to Smith', 1952, p. 131.
46 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
where none of us had been before, pausing at an open french win
dow that gave upon a lawn, at the farther end of which a tea-party
was in progress. We paused because the lawn was not so large that
we could not discern among the tea-drinkers the figures of Lytton
Strachey, Aldous Huxley and Duncan Grant, as well as that, so awe-
inspiring upon a first encounter, of our hostess Lady Ottoline
Morrell. At that moment, however, this modest patch of grass
seemed to us an alarmingly large area to cross beneath the gaze of
so many august eyes. So it is that I can still picture the group: Lyttou
Strachey inert in a low chair, red-bearded head drooped forward,
long hands drooping, finger tips touching the grass; Aldous Huxley
talking, with his face turned up towards the sun; Duncan Grant,
pale-faced, with fine, untidy black hair, light eyes ready to be coaxed
from their melancholy, and Lady Ottoline wearing a dress more
suitable, one would have thought, for some splendid Victorian
occasion, and an immense straw hat. In the course of the afternoon
I heard Grant speak, but one had to be alert to catch his scarcely more
than whispered words which, towards the close of his sentences,
became almost soundless. The friendliness he showed did not, how
ever, disguise even from my inexperience his membership of some
society with a means of communication very special to itself. After
listening to the discourse of Lytton Strachey and several others I
vaguely apprehended that in this Oxfordshire village were assembled
luminaries of a then to me almost unknown Cambridge world.
At this time Grant was thirty-seven years old, having been born at
Rothiemurchus, Inverness-shire, on 21 January 1885, the only child
of Major Bartle Grant, and his wife Ethel, born MacNcil, from
Kircudbrightshire. The Grants had for centuries been lairds of
Rothiemurchus, but as both Duncan Grant's grandmothers were
English his ancestry was as much English as Scottish. From the age of
two until the age of eight he lived in India, where his father's
regiment was serving, with home leave every second year. Even in
this early period of his life his responsiveness to what he saw was
sufficiently developed for him to experience a conscious joy, he told
me, in the colour and movement of Indian life, especially in the life
of the bazaars, of which he even made childish drawings* Back in
England he attended a private school at Rugby, and at the age of
fifteen he entered St. Paul's as a day boy, and being destined for a
DUNCAN GRANT 47
military career he was placed in the Army class, where mathematics
was the principal object of his study. But of mathematics he under
stood nothing and during his unhappy years at both schools a long-
cherished ambition to spend his life in drawing and painting took
an ever firmer hold. (At Rugby he prayed that God would make
him paint like Burne-Jones.) However little such an ambition would
have recommended itself to his father, his London home was with a
family whose outlook was radically different. His father's sister was
married to Sir Richard Strachey, at whose house in Lancaster Gate
he lived during his parents' continuing absence abroad. It soon be
came evident to Lady Strachey that Duncan Grant was without
either the qualifications or the disposition for an army career, and
she persuaded his parents to allow him to go, in 1902, to the
Westminster School of Art. Neither here, however, where he spent
upwards of two years, nor at the Slade which he briefly attended later
on did he make any particular mark nor did he derive much benefit
from the instruction he received. The somewhat negative response
to his art schools of this young man who during a youth shadowed
by the prospect of an army career had longed to be an artist was
due to the character of his second home. From it he received the
heightened consciousness and the intellectual stimulus that many
other students owe to the art schools they attend. As well indeed he
might, for it must have been one of the most intelligent houses in
England. The five Strachey brothers and their five sisters all shared
a passion for learning, a bracing scepticism, and a wit which made
membership of their circle an adventurous and exacting education.
One of the brothers, Lytton, became a lifelong intimate of his cousin
Duncan.
On leaving Westminster, after having failed to gain admission to
the Royal Academy Schools, he visited Italy, where he made copies
of the Masaccios in the Carmine, and studied with wondering awe
the Piero della Francescas at Arezzo: works now invariably acclaimed
as masterpieces but which at that time attracted comparatively little
notice.
A French painter, Simon Bussy, engaged to Dorothy Strachey,
was a visitor at his second home, and it was he who suggested that
Duncan Grant would profit by study in Paris. To Paris he accord
ingly went to spend a fruitful year as a pupil of Jacques-Emile
48 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Blanche, who taught at La Palette. I once asked him what paint
ings most impressed him in those days and he said that at the West
minster School he knew comparatively little about the work of his
older contemporaries. An occasional reproduction of a Degas or a
Whistler was passed from hand to hand. Paris, he said, did not en
large his knowledge as much as might be supposed. It was less easy
than it became a few years later to see the work of contemporaries
at the dealers' galleries, but it was from the Caillbotte Collection of
Impressionists, then hung at the Luxembourg, that he first received
the full impact of modern painting. He also studied the older masters,
especially Chardin, at the Louvre. Living at an hotel with English
students his contacts with the French were few. Upon his return to
London he spent a few weeks at the Slade before settling into a
studio in Fitzroy Square.
It was during these years that the group which became known as
'Bloomsbury' was in the process of formation. Bloomsbury came
into being as a consequence of the establishment in London of
members of a group of Cambridge men of several generations
drawn together by friendship - one of the most attractive charac
teristics of the group was the high value which its members put upon
friendship-and a community of ideas. The intellectual climate of the
group at Cambridge was analysed with penetration and candour in
the first of 'Two Memoirs' by Maynard Keynes, an original life
long member of it, in the essay entitled 'My Early Beliefs'. Among
the places where members of the group foregathered was the house
of Duncan Grant's cousins, the Stracheys. On account of the friend
ship between him and them it was natural that he should enter the
Bloomsbury circle. Although, even perhaps because, one of its least
publicly articulate members, he became one of those most generally
liked and respected: for he was highly intelligent, full of a high-
spirited enjoyment of life, and of a pale dark handsomeness, yet un
assertive, free from the rancour and virulent partisanship that marred
the characters of some of his friends. A still more important place of
meeting of the group was the house of Sir Leslie Stephen whose
daughters Virginia and Vanessa, with their husbands Leonard Woolf
and Mr. Clive Bell, constituted the centre of the circle of friends.
Into this house Duncan Grant was introduced by Lytton Strachey,
and with the Bells in particular has formed an intimate and lasting
DUNCAN GRANT 49
friendship. Other notable members of this circle of friends were
Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, E. M. Forster
and Lowes Dickinson. Fry Duncan Grant had first met at the age of
sixteen or seventeen at the Strachey's, and had been strongly im
pressed by his intellectual powers, but it was not until 1909, when he
again met him through the Bells, who already knew him well, that
the two men became intimate friends. In the Bloomsbury circle
Duncan Grant quickly became 'the painter' (with Vanessa Bell an
admired second), just as Fry became 'the art critic and expert' (with
Vanessa Bell's husband Clive his truculent suffragan), and Maynard
Keynes 'the economist and man of affairs'. The effect upon the artist
of the somewhat uncritical admiration and powerful advocacy of so
highly organized and so influential a body of friends is a matter
which I shall examine briefly later on. Duncan Grant's establishment
at the centre of this self-conscious, esoteric and highly intellectual
society placed him in an environment which exercised a strong and
continuing effect upon his art. It was, in fact, the decisive event of
his life.
There has been a disposition among some "of those who have
written about Duncan Grant to represent him, in quite early days, as
an apostle of the revolution made by the painting of Cezanne and
even of Picasso and Matisse. He can have known little about them,
however, before the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. Even
Fry confessed, as late as 1906, 'to having been hitherto sceptical about
Cezanne's genius', 1 It was not until two years later that Duncan
Grant saw for the first time works by Picasso and Matisse in the
collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris. The experience had
no immediate effect upon his own work, for in 1910 he painted the
Portrait of James Strachey* a characteristic *New English' picture, if
better composed than most, but the work, surely, of an eye innocent,
for all practical purposes, of C6zanne, a work in close accord with
that of the soberest spirits of the Club and as remote from that of
Picasso and Matisse as anything painted anywhere that year. This
portrait, like the early Still Lr/e, 3 of three years earlier, show him as
an intelligent and serious traditional painter, with an eye for con
struction and for the texture of things.
1 Virginia Woolf, op. cit., p. 112.
2 The Tate Gallery, London. 3 Coll. the late Lord Keynes.
50 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
The events which changed the direction of Duncan Grant's art
were the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. An
account of these two exhibitions, their effect upon individual
painters and the direction of painting in England and the resounding
sensation they provoked could make an illuminating and entertain
ing book. Duncan Grant once told me that he received no shock
from these exhibitions, even though they introduced him to some
painters whose work he had not previously seen. The change in his
own work suggests that when he saw Picassos, Matisses and other
contemporaries at the Stems he saw them with the eyes of an
intelligent sightseer, but that the impact he received from them at
the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions was so violent as to make it an
intimate part of his own experience. The ensuing change in his out
look declared itself at once. Even in such a picture as The Lemon
Gatherers, 1 of 1911, painted, Mr. Mortimer tells us, from Sicilian
memories 2 (from memories, he might have added, of Florence and
Arezzo as well), even in a picture in which he aimed at frankly
monumental form in the manner of the Italian masters, a certain
audacity and freedom testify to the pervasive influence of Post-
Impressionism. The difference between this and the other pictures
referred to, painted before he felt the impact of Post-Impressionism,
and those painted under its spell is conspicuous. After 1910 he painted
for a time with the fervour, but also at times with something of the
subservience, of a convert. Mr. Mortimer describes the early Post-
Impressionist paintings of Duncan Grant as 'without parallel in the
history of the British School'. 3 The possibility of being able to catch
in them 'references to ... Matisse, to African sculpture . . .' he docs
concede. 'References' is too ladylike a word, however, to meet the
occasion. Still Life 41 (apples), of about 1912, is almost pure CcSzanne.
Head of Eve f of 1913, is Picasso of the Demoiselles /Avignon period;
The Tub* of the same year, would be unimaginable without Matisse
and Background for a Venetian Ballet,' 7 of 1922, is a belated essay in
Fauvism, in the manner of Dcrain.
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
2 'Duncan Grant.' Penguin Modem Painters, 1944, p. 7. Mr, Mortimer is in error
in dating this picture 1908. The artist, accompanied by Mayiurd Keyncs, visited
Sicily and Tunis in 1911. 3 Ibid,, p. 9*
4 The Courtauld Institute, London. 5 Coll. Mr, David Garnett.
6 Coll Mrs. Vanessa Bell 7 Coll, Mrs. B. Mayor,
DUNCAN GRANT 51
What are difficult to catch in these essays are references to Duncan
Grant. And it cannot even be said that they are distinguished essays.
In the Head of Eve, for instance, Picasso's energetic hatching technique
has been closely imitated, but Picasso's austere adaptation of the grim,
impersonal masks from the Congo or the Ivory Coast has been
softened into a baby face with oversize eyes and a little pouting
mouth. Lest it should be supposed that I have drawn these examples
from the penumbra of admitted failures, it should be stated that all
have been selected for reproduction in either one or the other of the
two books devoted to the artist. 1 It was not until Grant's elation at
the discovery of the direct and audacious language of the Parisian
Post-Impressionists had somewhat subsided that he began to find
his own distinctive way of seeing and the means to give it form. In
1913 there came an opportunity for a wide extension of his range,
and the process helped him towards the discovery of what he was
best fitted to do. This opportunity he owed, as so much else, to his
friend Fry. In my study of Wyndham Lewis I had occasion to refer
to the organization by Fry of the Omega Workshops, inspired by the
dual purpose of enabling artists to live, without having to teach, by
making designs for furniture, pottery, textiles and the like, and mak
ing a constructive protest against the timid design and mechanical
finish of current factory products. A precursor of the Omega
venture was the assembling of the artists who collaborated in 1911
in the decoration of a room at the Borough Polytechnic. 2 Before
1 Mortimer, op. cit, and 'Duncan Grant', with an Introduction by Roger Fry, 1923 .
2 On the initiative of the Chairman of the House Committee, Basil Williams, a
friend of Roger Fry, a group of painters was commissioned to decorate a students'
dining-room. Williams's intention was to show how halls and refectories could be
made attractive by murals at comparatively low cost. Besides Grant the artists were
Fry, who played the leading part in the project's organization, Bernard Adeney,
Etchells, Macdonald Gill and Albert Rutherston. The theme chosen was London
on Holiday. *Wc decided,* wrote Adeney in a letter to a member of the Tate
Gallery staff (31 December 1953), *to employ the technique of graduating the
colour tones to a dark contour to increase the rhythm of the design as in Byzan
tine Mosaics.* At Fry's suggestion die paintings were made in a wax medium on
canvas so that they could be removed in the case of rebuilding. The total cost to the
authorities was about /^ioo. The scheme, which consisted of seven panels (Grant
was responsible for two), aroused considerable interest as an example of native
Post-Impressionism on a grand scale, although it appears to have made no appeal to
the staff or students, who considered the murals lugubrious. Rebuilding necessitated
their removal in 1929 and they were offered to various institutions, but were declined.
Eventually they were purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1931 for a nominal sum.
52 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
this time the Bloomsbury circle was an academic group composed
chiefly of Cambridge men of a philosophic inclination; thenceforward
Bloomsbury possessed a wing concerned with the visual arts. For
Duncan Grant participation in the Omega project was as fruitful
as it was embittering for Wyndham Lewis. The opportunity of
designing and decorating a wide variety of objects revealed both to
him and to others that he possessed a richly inventive faculty hitherto
hardly suspected. He quickly showed himself a designer with a fresh
and lyrical touch, with a touch, too, of fantasy, and a designer of
resource, so that he quickly came to set the tone of the Omega
products. The 'handwriting* of their decoration was essentially the
'handwriting' of Duncan Grant. There was one conspicuous feature,
however, which they derived from Fry. One of Fry's marked
characteristics was an innate hatred of what was smooth, facile or
mechanical. The suave facility of Sargent, for instance, provoked in
Fry a particular antipathy, exacerbated by the esteem in which these
qualities were held. (It is my belief that Sargent was a far more con
siderable artist than Fry allowed, but his paintings certainly possess
the character for which Fry had so consistent a distaste.) Another
object of this innate antipathy was the smooth regular finish of
machine products, which led him to persuade his artist friends
to exaggerate the irregularities which characterize the hand-made
object. Exaggerated irregularity, a touch, even, of wilful clumsiness,
suggestive of the intelligent and sensitive amateur beloved by Fry,
and subtly reproachful of the smoothly mechanical professional
whom Fry detested, remains, as a consequence of Duncan Grant's
months at the Omega, a permanezit characteristic of his work. If
this be a defect it is a small and rather engaging one to set against the
gains in confidence, versatility and self-knowledge which he owed
to the experience. It was not long before his enhanced resourcefulness
found varied use. Jacques Copeau invited him, in 1914, to design the
costumes for his production of 'Twelfth Night' at the Vieux
Colombier Theatre in Paris. Occasional designs for the theatre
became a feature of Duncan Grant's activity. *The making of designs
for the theatre is a sheer pleasure,' he told us, 'and a necessary rest
from painting, but I dislike the incidental work it involves, especially
the visits to the dressmaker/ Among the other theatrical productions
for which he has designed costumes, scenery, or both, are *Thc
4. DUNCAN GRANT. Grmi Tree with Dak tool (ip6l
Oil, 24x30 in. Coll Lady Keynci, '
DUNCAN GRANT 53
Pleasure Garden' by Beatrice Mayor, at the Stage Society; 'The
Postman', a short ballet in which Lopokova danced, at the London
Coliseum; Aristophanes' 'The Birds', at Cambridge, and 'The Son
of Heaven' by Lytton Strachey, at the Scala. Before the First World
War he began to decorate rooms in the houses of his friends, and in
the course of his life many different kinds of rooms have been
enlivened by his fantasy, as well as the room at the Borough Poly
technic, which with a group of other artists he decorated in 191 1. 1
It was before the war that he enjoyed the first of his rare meetings
with Matisse, the living painter whom he most admired and whose
example has counted for much in his own growth as an artist. With
a letter from Simon Bussy he called on Matisse at his house on the
route de Clamart, near Issy-les-Moulineaux. He is unable to recall
any words spoken by the master but he docs remember that he was
engaged upon a still-life with goldfish and that the celebrated La
Danse* was in the studio, though he distrusts a little this latter
memory. But as Matisse moved to this suburban house in 1910,
where The Dancers was painted in the same year, Duncan Grant may
well have seen it there. The first of Matisse's six goldfish subjects 3
was painted in this or the previous year and the last in 1915.
For Duncan Grant, as for thousands of others, the outbreak of the
First World War interrupted a way of life in which much had been
fulfilled but much more promised. Denied by his convictions the
harsh satisfaction of fighting for his country and in consequence the
opportunity of serving as a War Artist, these years were for him
relatively barren. For a time he worked on a farm in Suffolk. In 1916
Kcynes bought the farm-house named Charleston, near the village of
Firle in Sussex, *to provide*, he said, *a country house where Duncan
Grant and David Garnett * . . could discharge their obligations
under the National Service Act by doing agricultural labour,' 4
but he referred to it with characteristic generosity as 'Duncan's new
country house/ 6
As a young man Duncan Grant showed extraordinary high
spirits. The most striking manifestation was his participation in the
1 Grant's panels are Bathing and Football The Tate Gallery, London,
2 Museum of Western Art, Moscow.
3 Statcns Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen.
4 'Maynard Keynes f by Roy Harrod, 1951, p. 217.
5 Ibid.
54 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
'Dreadnought' hoax of 1910. With Horace Cole, the instigator,
Adrian Stephen and his sister, Virginia, he spent two or three hours
in the first great battleship, then shrouded in highly publicized secrecy,
disguised as an Abyssinian notable, after a telegram, purporting to
come from the Admiralty, advised the Captain of the visitors'
arrival. They were shown the wireless, then regarded as a species of
'secret weapon', but owing to their make-up did not dare accept an
invitation to luncheon. The exploit startled the whole country and
echoed round the world. Duncan Grant apologized to the First Lord
of the Admiralty, Reginald MacKenna. King Edward was greatly
distressed and expressed the hope that none of the culprits would
ever come to Court. In spite of such high spirits and the respect that
has been widely accorded to him on account of his detachment and
intelligence, his wide interests and the combination of an eager flow
of spirits with a dignified reserve, he rarely played any part in public
affairs. On one occasion he did, however, use his influence with
Keynes-who since about 1908 had been perhaps his closest friend-
to propose that the National Gallery should make some purchases
from the Degas sale of 1918. Keynes persuaded the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Bonar Law, of the wisdom of such a course and the sale
was attended by Keynes himself, representatives of the Treasury and
members of the staff of the National Gallery, 'Do buy Ingres portrait
of self Cezanne Corot even at cost of losing others', Duncan Grant
urged Keynes by cable. In consequence of his timely intervention
the National and Tate Galleries were enriched by the purchase of
works by Ingres, Corot, Delacroix, Forain, Gauguin, Manet-includ
ing his Firing Party -and others.
With the coming of peace Duncan Grant was able to settle down,
without serious interruption, to the doing of the greater part of his
life's work, taking a studio at first in Hampstcad, then one that had
been occupied by Whistler, Sickert and John at No. 8 Fitzroy Street,
later dividing his time between Charleston, occasional visits to
London where he usually takes an annual holiday, and, between
1927 and 1938, spending some months each year at Cassis near
Marseilles.
Free, by the early nineteen-twenties, from the spell of Post-
Impressionism he began to find a way of seeing very much his own,
or, to be more precise, two complementary ways: the way of a
DUNCAN GRANT 55
decorator and the way of a realist. The first was the earlier to reach
maturity. The comprehendingly affectionate essay by Fry published
in 1923 makes it clear that his friend and tutor was of the opinion
that his true talent was for decoration.
He pleases because the personality his work reveals is so spontaneous,
so unconstrained, so entirely natural and unaffected, [he wrote] . . .
he has ... a great deal of invention ... the peculiar playful, fantastic
elements in it which remind one occasionally of the conceits of Eliza
bethan poetry Gifted as he is with a particularly delightful rhythmic
sense and an exquisite taste in colour, he is particularly fitted to apply
his talents to decoration.
Fry emphasized this opinion by noting regretfully that 'at a time
when the movement of creative artists was in favour of insisting
almost exclusively upon the formal elements of design, he should
have tended to suppress his natural inclination to fantastic and poetic
invention The effort to create complete and solidly realized con
structions in a logically coherent space, which has succeeded of late
to the more decorative conception that derived from Gauguin, has,
I think, hampered rather than helped his expression. Duncan Grant
co-ordinates form more fully on the flat surface than in three dimen
sions/ In considering this opinion it should be remembered that it
was formed in 1923, when Duncan Grant had enjoyed numerous
opportunities -at the Omega, in the theatre and on the walls of
friends and patrons -to exercise his talents as a decorator, but that
he had as yet paid little attention to the creation of 'complete and
solidly realized constructions in space' and his most serious attempts
in this direction were made after the publication of Fry's essay.
Long before 1923 Fry had become the impassioned apostle of the
idea that everything of value in a work of art resides in its formal
harmony, and he had become a victim of a mystique of pure form.
Content was of no consequence except in as much as it favoured
formal harmony, 1 want to find out what the function of content
is/ he wrote to Lowes Dickinson in 1913, *and am developing a
theory which you will hate very much, viz. that it is merely directive
of form, and that all the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure
form/ 1
Duncan Grant was far the most gifted artist in the closely knit
1 Virginia Woolf, op. at, p. 183.
56 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Bloomsbury circle, the court painter and designer, so to speak, so
that an admission that he was so far in his own work from exemplify
ing the cherished doctrine of pure form as even to 'remind one
occasionally of the conceits of Elizabethan poetry' must have been
one that Fry made with reluctance. It is evident that he made it with
the utmost conviction. An anonymous critic once wrote to Fry that
he seems to have felt that * ... in cases of maladjustment between
artist and critic the fault was almost always on the artist's side'.
Brueghel and Hogarth and Turner lay in their graves, all their mani
fold shortcomings beyond the critic's correction. But Duncan
Grant lived, so to speak, within point blank range. Fry had a passion
for acting the mentor and Duncan Grant was the continuously
praised 'star turn'. I do not know how insistently the critic played
the mentor in this case and there must be two or three informed upon
the matter. I once discussed with Duncan Grant to what extent he
regarded himself as affected by aesthetic theories. Tve had to pay
attention to many theories,' he answered, speaking with deliberation,
'but I don't believe I've adopted any. With me it's been rather a
question of picking one's way through theories. I could hardly help
being interested in theories, but my interest doesn't go very deep/
Standing open to correction I would hazard the guess that Duncan
Grant did 'pay attention' to the prevailing insistence upon the exclu
sive value of the formal elements of design, especially when sup
ported by Fry's extraordinarily persuasive argument, with the result
that the preoccupation of this born decorator was largely diverted
from decoration to the creation of 'complete and solidly realized
constructions in a logically coherent space'. Just as, in tlic age of
Reynolds, the painter who was not a painter of 'history* was inferior
to him who was, so, in the Bloomsbury circle, the painter who did
not realize such constructions was inferior to him who did.
Because it would have given Fry such satisfaction to praise the
purely formal qualities in his art, his praise of him as a decorator
should be received with particular respect. Fry extols his decorative
qualities, the elegance of his handling, the singular charm of his
manner, his lyrical joyousness and his enjoyment of what is beautiful
-in the ordinary sense-in nature. None the less he seems to mo to
lack one of the essential qualities of a great decorator, namely the
power to enhance the act of living by e^diilarating those who see his
5. HENRY LAMB, Portrait ofLytton Stmchey (1914).
Oil, 94 X 70 in. Coll. Mr, J, 1. Itehrend.
DUNCAN GRANT 57
works with a vision of a humanity and its environment idealized,
either by the creation of an Olympus, a Parnassus, an Arcadia, or
even-to descend to a commonplace level~a humanity'glamourized'.
Unless, in fact, by its exuberance, wit, gaiety, and style, a decoration
affords us a glimpse of a world of greater nobility, delight or amenity
than that with which we are familiar, it cannot be said to have realized
its principal purpose. It is easy to recognize in the decorations of
Duncan Grant the engaging qualities which delighted Fry, and others
besides. Take, for instance, Decoration on a Cupboard, 1 of 1921, or
Long Decoration- Dancers* of 1934. The earlier shows fantasy and
wit and a feeling for the poetry of homely objects, and the later is
rhythmic in movement, clear and gay in colour, the whole lyrical
in feeling. Yet in spite of its manifold beauties neither is really
intended to enhance life; the heavy boneless limbs of the dancers,
their flabby hands, their thick humourless feet suggest that the
painter was not quite in earnest about this all-important purpose.
Sir Kenneth Clark once wrote of Duncan Grant's concern with 'the
earthly adventures of amorous gods'. But for the sake of which of
his dancers would Jupiter have given himself the trouble of changing
into a bull? It may be that beneath his gay lyricism lurks a melan
choly that makes him sceptical about the prospects of enhancing
man's condition. It does not seem to me, as it seemed to Fry in 1923,
that the artist co-ordinates form less fully in three dimensions than
he docs on a flat surface. Whatever forces persuaded him to attempt
to 'create complete and logically realized constructions' -whether
Fry himself or the consensus of opinion among the artists of his
acquaintance-it appears difficult to deny to Duncan Grant a sub
stantial measure of success, especially in his portraits of women.
Of a longish series there are at least two which take their places with
the fine portraits of our time: Miss Holland, 3 of 1930 (Plate 3), and
Vanessa Be'//, 4 of 1942. In the earlier a design which beautifully com
bines great breadth with great subtlety, animated by sweeping move
ment, is carried out with a masterly ease and precision. Nothing is
omitted or scamped, but the detail takes a subordinate, though
1 Coll. the late Lord Kcynes.
2 The City Art Gallery, Birmingham*
8 Coll, the Artist Reproduced in Mortimer, op, cit under the tide Pour vous.
4 The Tate Gallery, London,
58 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
enriching, place in the largely seen scheme of things, and the por
trait is evidently a penetrating likeness. The later portrait is remark
able for a combination of all his decorative resources-figure, draped
curtain, high chair, screen, cloak and patterned carpet are related in
a harmony at once opulent and of great dignity- with, the creation
of a wholly convincing presence. Such a combination is rare in con
temporary portraiture. Vanessa Bell is a modest descendant, as it
were on a scale appropriate to our time, of the great portraits of the
past in which stateliness and insight into character marched naturally
together. How appropriate that so admirable a portrait should have
for its subject the artist with whom he has been most constantly
associated: who has worked so often simultaneously from the same
models and from whose talent, at once distinguished and robust, his
own has derived nourishment. These two portraits and a handful of
others will outlast, I think, any of the purely decorative paintings of
Duncan Grant.
There is another theme which has on many occasions brought his
highest faculties into play, namely the nude. To my thinking Duncan
Grant has made nothing more beautiful than these pastels from the
nude model and a few are among the most lyrical drawings of the
time. I have particularly in mind a Nude, 1 of 1934, and a Nude study?
of 1935. The owner of these two lovely drawings accurately
described the artist's vision as 'so instinctively and unhesitatingly
chromatic that he can build up a passage of modelling with strokes
of pure colour 3 . 3 The words were written before these two draw
ings were made, but this ability was never more perfectly exempli
fied than in the second of them.
Some ten years ago Duncan Grant put his hand to an undertaking
of a different character from anything he had done hitherto* When
I received an invitation from the artist in the summer of 1943 to go
down to Sussex to see a series of wall paintings which Vanessa Bell,
her son Quentin and he himself had carried out in the parish church
at Berwick, a village not far from Firle, I took the journey with
interest tempered by misgiving. It did not seem to me that he was
well equipped either in mind or hand for such an enterprise.
1 Coll. Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B. 2 Coll. Sir Kenneth Clark, K,C,B.
3 'Drawings by Duncan Grant at AgnewY, in 'The New Statesman and
Nation', 17 June 1933,
DUNCAN GRANT 59
Neither the sceptical, or rather the in general positive hostility of the
Bloomsbury circle to Christianity-hostility, let it be said at once,
not so much to the Christian ethic as to the Christian Church, more
particularly in its supernatural aspects-nor the decorative method
of wall painting he had evolved for the evocation of the philandering
of nymphs and satyrs, seemed to promise anything but failure. It was
apparent when I entered the church that my apprehensions were
groundless. The Nativity and The Annunciation were represented by
Vanessa Bell, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, by Quentin
Bell, and Christ in Glory by Duncan Grant himself. There was no
mistaking that the series was the work of three different hands, but
they all radiated the same mood of noble gravity. The figures were
solid, clearly defined, yet not without a becoming touch of mystery.
The one defect that I noticed was that the solidity of certain of the
figures was insisted upon to a degree which caused them to project
from the walls and thereby to break the unity of surface of the series
as a whole. Even if the Berwick paintings bear no comparison with
those at Burghclere they must, I think, be accounted among the best
paintings to be made in church or chapel in England during the
present century.
With characteristic delicacy of feeling the artists arranged that I
should visit the church alone. My visit ended, I joined them and Mr.
Clive Bell for lunch at Charleston. It was a curious experience, and
for several reasons, chiefly because it was the first occasion since I had
stayed with Roger Fry as a schoolfriend of his son Julian that I had
been in the house of a member of the inner circle of Bloomsbury.
Duncan Grant is not a good hater, and he took no part that I know
of in, the Bloomsbury vendetta against my father, who was, I
believe, one of the first artists to give him encouragement. In any
case the cohesion of the group had loosened and its influence waned,
and I sensed, mainly from the conversation of Mr. Clive Bell, that
certain younger artists now provoked greater antipathy than a son
of my father. Certain sharp comments he made about younger con
temporaries gave me a sudden realization of the extent to which the
survivors of a circle regarded when I was young as aggressive
advocates of 'significant form' and other 'advanced' ideas had
become 'Old Bolsheviks' who showed less sympathy towards
younger artists accounted 'advanced* than my older painter friends
60 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
such as Matthew Smith and Charles Ginner who were their seniors.
In fact, having vaguely expected to be made delicately to feel re
actionary, I found myself in an environment fascinating for its
'period' interest though for other reasons, of course, as well. There
were the pieces of Omega furniture and carpets and the textiles
designed by my hosts, their slightly clumsy yet distinguished pottery
embellished by swirls and hooks in their deliberately irregular, their
unmistakable calligraphy; also the iron stove, the mustard-coloured
wall-paper and other objects made familiar by their pictures. All this
and the gentle voices, dying away often, of the artists and the boom
ing voice of the critic expressing opinions in which an urbane
liberalism blended oddly with unexpected rigidities, strong pre
judices more easily sensed than defined. Here I was in the only
corner of this vanishing society to survive intact: people and en
vironment, every thing: even, out of the windows, could be glimpsed
the subjects of so many of the two artists' landscapes.
At the conclusion of this brief study of Duncan Grant's painting
it might be useful if I were to put together and set down what I
remember his saying about his method of painting. Landscapes and
still-lifes he does direct from life, beginning with very summary
indications in charcoal on the canvas but generally without pre
liminary studies,
but I begin to paint [he explained] as soon as I possibly can. It's not only
that painting is such a delight, but as I paint with difficulty I want to
come to grips with it with the least delay. When I first came to know
him at the Stracheys [he continued] Simon Bussy urgently impressed
on me the value of making copies and I've always followed his advice.
I don't try to make exact copies but interpretations. I agree with Bussy
that there is a great deal to be learnt from this practice. It isn't the paint
ing that one does before another painting that teaches one. The real
idea behind copying is to induce one to look at a picture for a long time.
Even if you're a painter and deeply interested, it is difficult to look for
very long and it is much easier if one is doing something.
^ I usually have several pictures going at the same time- too many
f m inclined^ to think-sometimes compositions, at others realistic
works. I don't often work on pictures of both kinds at the same time:
my interest in imaginative works and in realistic ones runs in phases. . . .
I am very conscious that these brief studies of mine, although
perhaps not wholly without value as reports of an eye-witness or of
DUNCAN GRANT 6l
a witness at one remove, omit much of importance, and that they
will all of them be quickly superseded. But none, I fancy, so quickly
as this study of Duncan Grant, The circle to which he belonged
included some of the most articulate persons of their generation: they
have left, and will leave, innumerable letters and other records which
will vastly amplify our knowledge of the lives and works of its
members and possibly lead to radical reappraisals. There is a classic
waiting to be written on this circle full of interest, indeed unique in
its time, although in certain respects so malign in its influence.
For the moment, however, although there clings to the name of
Duncan Grant an aura of respect, interest in his work declines. From
one generation to another the focus of interest inevitably shifts, but
this alone does not account for the neglect of an artist of gifts so
considerable and so various. There is another, a more readily per
ceptible cause. When Bloomsbury was a power in the intellectual
and artistic life of England and its nominees held or dominated most
strategic critical positions, praise of Bloomsbury's court painter
became the rule. Most people have by now forgotten to what
lengths these routine paeons went. Take, for instance, these words
by an ordinarily sensible critic, Mr. William Gaunt:
Duncan Grant is an artist in the full sense of the word- as opposed to
the typical English artist who never grows up -in the Constable
tradition, ... I do not think, however, it is too much to say that he
combines some of the masculine English quality with a wider and more
imaginative outlook than the men of Suffolk. 1
More significant still are some sentences in an article by an extremely
conservative critic, Mr. Adrian Bury, who in the course of what is
plainly intended as a severely critical notice described Duncan
Grant as *a sort of nephew of C6zanne, but with more discipline
than his uncle, a painter who has made Post-Impressionism logical*. 2
Sporadic praise of this kind, however lacking in discrimination, did
little harm. Entirely different was the praise that issued forth, almost
week by week in the vastly influential Bloomsbury 'parish maga
zine* 'The Nation*, after 1931 'The New Statesman and Nation'.
Its most regular art critic was Mr. Clive Bell who contributed to the
first and was the art critic to the second from 1933 to 1943. This
1 'Drawing and Design*, May 1927.
2 'The Saturday Review', 20 August 1931.
62 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
critic's praise of his wife and of his intimate friend Duncan Grant
was as continous as it was excessive. Take a characteristic passage
in an article in which allusion is made to Duncan Grant's 'genius':
'Here is the most important exhibition yet given', wrote Mr. Bell,
'by the living artist whom many good judges consider the best . . .
after seeing these pictures none will be at pains to contradict.' 1 In the
course of the article Picasso, Bronzino, Constable, Piero della
Prancesca and Gainsborough are mentioned by way of comparison.
The harm caused by this routine spate of such injudicious praise -
more especially when it contrasted so sharply with the treatment
accorded to other artists -involved twofold, and, as I am persuaded,
threefold injury to Duncan Grant. It wearied a whole generation
with his name; worse still, it sowed the suspicion in the minds of other
artists that they were belittled in order that his reputation might be en
hanced, and thereby bred dislike of a man of integrity and charm of
character; and, as I believe, it had a deleterious effect upon the artist
himself. With all his qualities as an artist he has one insufficiency: an
insufficiency of passion. Compare one of his landscapes with one by
Gainsborough, Constable, Courbet or Corot or any great landscape
painter, and what is usually at once apparent is that his subject has
mattered less to him than theirs to them: where they have manifest
passion he has a tasteful intelligence. Usually not always: there
are conspicuous exceptions to this generalization, such as Green
Tree with Dark Pool, 2 of 1926 (Plate 4). But for a man with an
insufficiency of passion few things can be more enervating than
the lifelong echo of 'genius, genius, genius* in his ears. But the
effects of overpraise, however reckless, will pass and Duncan Grant
will be recognized for a painter with a sense of beauty matched by a
sense of actuality, and for a decorator of extraordinary resource,
1 'The New Statesman and Nation*, May 1034.
2 Coll.LadyKe y nes.
JAMES DICKSON INNES
1887-1914
FEW, if any, more painters are able to maintain themselves by
the practice of their art than were able to do so before the
Second World War. But if they cannot live as artists, their
existence-the existence of a fortunate few among them-is at least
recognized. The exhibition of their work abroad is believed to make
a modest contribution to British prestige, and it is officially spon
sored. It is also believed that some good may come of its exhibition
within the shores of these islands, and this too receives official
support.
Before this last war, however, a painter, unless spectacularly
successful or else notable for something besides his work, was
ignored. In the Introduction to these studies, which prefaces the first
volume, I referred to an acquaintance's having told me that she was
engaged upon a study of Innes, and I made the comment that,
although this painter had been dead only thirty-eight years, the
materials for this undertaking would be assembled with infinite
labour. Some time has passed, and I have heard nothing further, but
I fancy the undertaking has been abandoned, and I doubt whether
material adequate for anything more than a sketch any longer exists.
A sketch has indeed been written, and well written, by a friend who
was a fellow student of Innes' s and whose intimacy ended only
four years before his death. But except for Mr. FothergilTs few
illuminating pages, 1 Innes the man, so to speak, has sunk into his
grave almost without trace. His death passed virtually unrnentioned
in the Press, although it has been said that his friend and patron
Horace Cole managed to secure the insertion of a few lines
about him in one of the weeklies. 2 Nor has Innes been judged
1 'James Dickson Innes*, with an Introduction by John Fothergill to the repro
ductions collected and edited by Lillian Browse, I94&-
2 The authority for this statement is the late Randolph Schwabe, Slade Professor,
University College, London, from 1930 to 1949. who published an article
'Reminiscences of Fellow Students*, relating principally to Innes, but with
references to John Curric, Derwcnt Lees and a few others, which appeared in
<53
64 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
sufficiently important for mention in 'The Dictionary of National
Biography'. 1
James Dickson Innes was born on 27 February 1887 at Llanelly,
where his father, a Scot, had an interest in a brass and copper works.
His grandfather and great-grandfather both served in H.M. Customs
and Excise. Both his brothers distinguished themselves, Alfred as a
biological chemist, and Jack, who died in 1931, as a naval architect.
'It was a well-bred family at Llanelly/ Mr. Fothergill tells us, Tour
serious and almost silent males, and Mrs. Innes the life of it. 5 Innes
attended Christ's College, Brecon, and from 1904 until 1905 the art
school at Carmarthen, winning a scholarship which took him to the
Slade, where he remained until 1908. He spent his vacation in 1906
at Oxford and Plymouth, and in 1907 at Chepstow, a painting
ground favoured by Steer, his own favourite teacher at the Slade,
and in the same year, while still a student, he first exhibited at the
New English Art Club. In the year following his death-knell
sounded: he was ill, and his illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis by
Dr. Tebb, who was for a time our own family doctor. I clearly
recall his thin pale face, his reddish hair, but still more clearly how
much more interest he showed in discussing painting and literature
than in medicine.
It is difficult to make out how much talent Inncs's work showed
before he came to the Slade. It was without character, Mr. Fothergill
declares, 'all save the grandiose conception, The Quarry, Llanelly ^
But this picture is dated, in the volume to which he contributed the
essay already cited, as 1906, that is, when he was already a student at
the Slade. To judge by the reproduction in this book-I have not
'The Burlington Magazine* in January 1943, I already possessed, in briefer but
rather more candid form, the facts set forth in the 'Burlington 1 article. On 24
March 1941, 1 spent an afternoon with Schwabe at Oxford. At that time neither
Mr. FotherguTs essay nor, of course, Schwabe's own article had appeared, and
concerned at the probability that almost every vestige of the life and personality
of an artist of extraordinary gifts should be irreparably lost, I responded warmly
when he spoke of Innes, and made notes immediately afterwards of what he told
me. I think it must have been my insistence upon the duty of someone who knew
him to put down what he remembered that prompted the 'Burlington* article.
1 Among the subjects of these studies those in the previous volume who qualify
for inclusion, ten years having elapsed since their death, the following are included :
McEvoy, Orpen, Tonks; the following are not: Oilman, G wen John, Gore,
2 The Pare Howard Museum, Llanelly.
JAMES DICKSON INNES 65
seen the original-it is a 'New English' landscape of what Sickert
used to call 'an august site', but it showed aspirations after monu-
mentality based upon hard structure not commonly to be met with
at the Club's exhibitions.
In spite of his originality he was easily led, and what I take to be
the principal painting he made during his Slade years, The Wye near
Chepstow, 1 of about 1907, was an elaborate-and highly successful-
essay in the manner of Steer of one of his master's favourite motives,
in which, however, the luminosity of grass and foliage does not
disguise his greater delight in the rocky elements in nature or his
concern with design.
Figure drawing he found both difficult and distasteful, and it was
an exercise which he often avoided. Oddly enough he was awarded
a prize for a figure competition with Death of the Firstborn, but
according to Mr. Fothergill this was an imaginative landscape in
which 'the first born themselves, a muddled little group of three
figures, were relegated to a shadow in the middle distance'. Either
towards the end of his term at the Slade or shortly afterwards he
painted a small group of figure pieces, of which the two most
successful are Moonlight and Lamplight* and Resting. 3 The first
represents a subject which offered many difficulties, in particular the
harmonizing of the genial but prosaic lamplight which fills the room
and the blue and silver moonlight seen outside the window. The
figure seated beside the window is Innes's friend and follower, the
Australian-born painter Derwent Lees. If this figure is featureless, that
in Resting is inept, with her huge head and tiny face and supporting
arm too feeble for its function. More interested in inanimate nature
than in his fellow men, in these and similar interiors still-life takes
precedence over figures. In the first picture the landscape outside the
window gives occasion for a muted expression of his most passionate
love, but the furniture and even the clear-cut shadows were the
objects of a more affectionate scrutiny than the artist's friend. In the
second the most vividly realized features are the curling prints hang
ing on the wall framed with black bands of shadow along two edges.
But Innes's short painting life began, Mr. Fothergill has told us,
when in 1908 the two of them went to France together, first to
1 Coll Mr. Hugo Pitman. 2 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Crossland,
3 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Crossland.
66 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Caudebec, then to Bozouls, near Rodez and last to Coliioure, near
Perpignan. At the second place he painted Bozouls near Rodez? a
'New English' picture with an added crispness and sparkle, and a
group of water-colours, of which Bozouls, near Rodez? the only one
of them known to me, is somewhat summary and empty. It was,
Mr. Fothergill wrote, at Coliioure with its ' Saracenic church , . .
and gem-like with fishing boats of antique build and scarlet sails',
and its heat and light, that Innes's sense of colour was awakened, but
not until he was back to England did this transforming experience
become apparent in his painting. 'But for this visit', concludes Mr.
Fothergill, 'we might have had in Innes just one more exponent of
pale English sunshine and veiled charm.' Within the next two years
he had evolved a way of expressing what he saw and felt, and about
1910, working consciously against time, he began to paint his finest
pictures.
The art of Innes was a singular art. Mountains were his theme, yet
his representation of them was not grandiose or monumental. A
critic's jibe that he made molehills out of mountains is justified to
that extent, but his eminences were spacious, rhythmical, often noble
and sometimes menacing. If there was nothing vast about them,
equally there was no tiling small or mean; perhaps on account of his
disinterest in man they are oddly scalcless. According to Mr. Pother-
gill he was an unsophisticated lover of nature, who even pretended
to know all about trees and butterflies, yet the reflection of his
knowledge in his pictures is a faint one. We learn from the same
authoritative source that he was an impassioned student of Turner,
Constable and Cotman, but that he owed nothing to French painters.
To his English predecessors, Cotman in particular, his debts are
evident, but his approach to his subjects, especially as manifest in his
pure, vivid colour, his sparing use of neutral tones, his hard, clear-
cut forms, associates him with Gauguin and other Post-Impres
sionists. Had Innes consciously admired these French masters, Mr*
Fothergill would hardly have given so explicit a denial that he owed
them nothing. There was a channel, however, through which their
influence might have reached him and taken a hold upon his un
conscious mind. Like Augustus Jolm, Innes was associated with the
Camden Town Group. The differences between these two and the
1 The Tate Gallery, London. 2 The Leicester Galleries, London,
JAMES DICKSON INNES 67
members of this group of painters of urban landscape were con
spicuous, yet close personal relations subsisted between them; indeed
John and Innes were titular members of it. It is likely that the
passion for strong, pure colours and the contempt for neutral tones
which animated Oilman (a disciple of Van Gogh) and to an only
slightly lesser degree Bevan (who knew Gauguin) and Ginner (who
had long been familiar with the painting of the Post-Impressionists
working in France) should have communicated itself in some degree
to Innes.
That French influence, if it played any part in the formation of
Innes's painting, played a part of which the painter was unaware,
receives some corroboration from Matthew Smith. The two
painters went together, he told me, in 1908 or the following year,
to the house of Leo Stein, where Innes showed himself not only
entirely unresponsive to the works of Matisse and other Post-
Impressionists so finely represented there but even to those of
Cfaannc. (There was another occasion when Matthew Smith,
regretting Innes's apathy if not dislike, took him to Vollard's gallery,
but the dealer, less sympathetic towards students than dealers in
general are to-day, unceremoniously turned them out.) The exotic
character of his art and in particular his rosy mountain-peaks may
owe something to the study of Japanese prints, too, which were
commonly met with in his day: the British Museum, which he often
visited, housed, then as now, a splendid collection of them. Inter
national art movements arc notoriously pervasive, their slightest
manifestations, only unconsciously received or half understood, are
often sufficient to serve their inscrutable though imperative purposes,
for they may be seed falling upon soil ready to receive them. Whether
on account of some elusive interplay of influences or else through
spontaneous generation, the art of Innes is in fact closely related to
that of the Post-Impressionists, and has little in common with that
of Steer or of the others whom he regarded as his masters. In spite of
his talk about botany his art was not primarily a descriptive art. The
contemplation of mountains induced in him a mood of exaltation,
which he expressed most eloquently in terms of conscious design,
sometimes, as in his celebrated Waterfall, 1 of 1910, of a very elaborate
character, and of pure, strong, even violent colour.
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
68 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
If Innes was unaware of the effects of Post-Impressionism upon
himself, he was certainly aware of a strain in himself recalcitrant to
Ruskin's injunction 'to go to nature with all singleness of heart,
selecting nothing, rejecting nothing'. At Bozouls, on his momentous
first journey to France, he expressed misgiving to Mr. Fothergill at
his impulse 'to try for something more or better than nature'. Til
go and be moral/ he said, and spent the next three afternoons making
a precise study of a green boulder in a stream. Later he showed him
a big canvas, which in the course of three laborious but fruitless
weeks he had covered with thousands of representations of leaves,
but he quickly came to understand that for him this kind of exercise
was immoral. From St. Ives, where he went the following year, he
wrote to Mr. Fothergill, 'An artist came to see some of my latest
pictures. "That's a good slap at nature," said the man wishing to be
encouraging. "I think, rather, it's a good slap in the face," I replied/
It was to St. Ives that his mother took him for a longish stay at
'The Retreat' in order that he should fight, in the healthiest circum
stances, the disease that had fastened upon his lungs, but he knew
that he stood no chance. 'Really I am entirely happy now here + . .
my mind is, I think, fairly disconnected from the body which is not
so strong as might be but the mind seems all right, so don't say, "You
flatter yourself".' And late that year or early next he wrote for Mr.
Fothergill a parody of Blake's poem to Flaxman, of which he gives
these lines in his essay:
. . . Pneumonia and drink appeared to me and terror appeared in heaven
above
And Hell beneath and a mighty and awful change threatened my earth
And the germicidal war began, all its dark horror passed before my face,
And my angels told me that seeing such visions I could not subsist upon
earth
Innes's first love was always his painting, but he was also a romantic
lover of life, and the knowledge that he had only a little time left, a
few years at most, led him not only to intensify his efforts as a painter
but disposed him the more to live, after his easy, casual fashion, still
more fully. From quite early days he had showed some disposition
to depend, for forgetting what he wished to forget and for heighten
ing his pleasures with a rosy aura, upon alcohol The nearer prospect
of death increased this dependence.
JAMES DICKSON INNES 69
About this time the friendship between Innes and Mr. Fothergill
came to an end, and they never met again, and one consequence is
that with it ends the slight record which, nevertheless, remains the
chief source of information about the artist and the man. The
narrative suddenly breaks off and little is added about either the
painting or the life of Innes during the four final years. About the
former he offers only one comment of substance, namely that he
was in a hurry. 'Earlier he had worked,' he writes, 'with the same
charming leisure with which he had walked and talked, but latterly,
I was told, he angrily regretted all that work as wasted and began to
work at top speed.'
It does not seem to me that this stricture is justified by Innes's
work. Both his earlier and his later life had their failures, but it was
during the years 1910-13 -after the breach with Mr. Fothergill- that
he painted the pictures by which he is likely to be remembered.
There was a time, certainly, around 1912, when his touch became
swifter and more fluent, but his best paintings of that time, in which
speed and fluency are apparent, cannot be said to show signs of haste.
Such, for instance- to name only a few, illustrations of which
accompany his essay-are Tan-y-Grisiau?* Mediterranean? Ranun
culus* and In the Welsh Mountains*
It is unfortunate that Innes should have foregone the company of
his close friend and brief chronicler at the very moment when he
was entering upon the most fruitful period of his short life. In 1910
and the two years following he visited in Wales, where, applying
his now fully awakened sense of colour to the interpretation of the
splendid landscape of his native country, he painted the greater
number of his finest pictures. The innate understanding he had of the
mountains of Wales gave a reassuring credibility to his most exotic
conceptions: Mount Arenig and Bala Lake, however unearthly from
a momentary effect of sunlight their colouring may be, are always
of the earth. Some, though by no means all, of his Mediterranean
landscapes have by comparison the look of pure fantasies.
The most remarkable picture he made during that first year of full
maturity was The Waterfall* (Plate 6), a water-colour. There are
i Coll. Captain Peter Harris. 2 Coll. Mrs. Arthur Gibbs.
3 The Contemporary Art Society (Sir Edward Marsh Bequest), now in the
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
4 The City Art Gallery, Manchester. 5 The Tate Gallery, London,
JQ MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
other pictures by his hand which glow with a richer or a more
scintillating light, but in none known to me does he show such
mastery of intricate design. It is a picture that maintains a delicate
balance-and it is chiefly this which gives it an unearthly air-between
abstraction and representation. At one moment it presents itself to
our gaze as a complex of forms and movements which, from what
ever angle one may regard them, hold us under their spell. (I know
of few small modern pictures which invite-or repay-so prolonged
a scrutiny.) At another, it represents, and most convincingly, a wide
stream which flows out of the far distance towards the spectator
between strangely formed rocks and beneath a menacing sky,
descending here and there over shallow falls until, in the foreground,
it abruptly precipitates over black rocks into two big falls, and it is
full face and from midstream that he witnesses this fascinating
culmination of a quiet journey. The Waterfalls an exercise in design,
more especially in the silhouetting of one form against another
derived from Cotman, of a complexity which gives it a place apart
among the works of Innes. There is another particular in which it
differs from his most characteristic works, in which the focus of
interest is the far distance: the point where mountain-peak stands up
black against an opal sky or else emerges sharp and clear above a
fleecy wreath of cloud, and the foreground is summarily handled or
even on occasion dispensed with altogether. In The Waterfall the
spectator is compelled to share the artist's fascination with a fore
ground which, however, is intimately linked, both formally and
dramatically, with the farthest background. Preoccupation with the
distant-in this picture the meeting-point of sombre peak and
menacing sky-marks another but less splendid work of this year,
The Dark Mountains: Brecon Beacons. 1 In one respect the best of his
landscapes of the following year make a new departure. The outlines
of The Dark Mountains: Brecon Beacons are lacking in the character
of rock: they are a little soft in modelling and texture; but those
which so nobly rise in the two of the Bala Lake of about 19 n,
have all rock's density and hardness. These, more especially that with
the high central peak, are beautifully classical in their lucid harmony.
Fine, too, is an Arenif in its combination of radiance with weight,
1 Temple Ncwsam, Leeds. 2 Coll Mr. Louis G. C. Clarke.
3 The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Masscy Coll.).
JAMES DICKSON INNES 7!
but a Tan-y-Grisiau, 1 of about the same time, is a fluffy pastiche of
Constable's Weymouth Bay.
Round about 1911, too, the increased swiftness and fluency of
handling to which I alluded just now became a marked though inter
mittent feature of Ms work, and more conspicuously in the Mediter
ranean landscapes than in the Welsh. It would seem that the heat and
the brilliance of the South of France, which first excited his audacious
sense of colour, also stimulated him to the use of this rapid and
summary way of painting, and that the Welsh mountains favoured
a serener although a still more exalted mood. It was particularly in
his interpretations of these that he seemed to be haunted by a highly
personal conception of the ideal landscape which also haunted the
imaginings of Puvis de Chavannes and Gauguin. The ideal landscape
of Innes, unlike that of these two, was not an idyllic setting for man,
but a wild landscape generally austere in form though in colour
glowing with a romantic radiance, and peopled, only latterly and
then with reluctance, by a lone figure or at most a couple.
One of the marks of Innes as a colourist was the audacity with
which he used purple. Schwabe told me that Innes reproved him for
speaking disrespectfully of the representation of purple heather, and
was unimpressed when reminded of Ruskin's warning against the
free use of purple. This was a colour generally avoided in English
painting until the Prc-Raphaelites used it and regarded it indeed
almost as an emblem of their emancipation from subserviency to
outworn, but still tyrannically enforced, conventions. 'And then
about colour', Holman Hunt reports his young self saying to Millais
in criticism of prevailing methods,
why should the gradation go from the principal white, through yellow,
to pink and red, and so on to stronger colours? With all this sub
serviency to early examples, when the turn of violet comes, why does
the courage of the modern imitator fail? If you notice, a clean purple
is scarcely ever given in these days. * . . 2
Innes could easily have seen, indeed so regular a visitor to art
galleries could not well have avoided seeing, work by the Pre-
Raphaclites, but I have found no evidence that they were objects of
1 Coll Rt Hon. Vincent Massey, P,C, C.H.
2 'Prc-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood', by W. Holman
Hunt, OJM, D.C.L. Two vols, 1905, Vol. I, p. 88.
72 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
his particular study, and it is no more possible to say whether Innes
was affected by the deep evocative purple of Hunt and Hughes -'the
colour of Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty and Death' -and by the
jewel-like colours of the Pre-Raphaelites than whether he was by
the forthright, audacious colours of the Post-Impressionists. Some
day, perhaps, the discovery of letters written by Innes, more informa
tive than those at present known, will enable us to form a clearer
notion of the external influences that contributed to the formation
of his art.
Innes's most successful works were in water-colour, although he
painted from the first in oil as well, but towards the end he came to
prefer the heavier medium. Ill health and awareness of how little
time was left to him brought a feverish quality to his work. The large
Arenig? of 1913, which at a distance seems to be a kind of summing
up of Innes's achievement, on closer inspection reveals forms loose
and unfelt, and colours, like the colours of a poster, designed to make
an immediate impression rather than to give prolonged delight.
The work of his last years was marked by an innovation: the
introduction into his landscape of figures. Interiors with figures had
long been a subject of occasional interest to him, but of an interest
conspicuously less intense than that inspired in him by landscape.
As a consequence, however, of the ripening of his friendship with
Augustus John- which began probably about ipio-with whom he
spent much of the spring and summer of 1911 and 1912 in North
Wales, during the latter year the presence of a female figure or two,
of somewhat Johannine aspect, became a feature of his landscape.
Mountain Pool, 2 of 1911, Tan-y-Grisiau: The Green Dress* The Van
Pool, 4 ' both of 1912, and the splendid Mountain Lake, 5 of 1913, all
contain figures. When John introduces a figure into a landscape it
is apt to become a focus of interest, but unlike his friend Innes was
not a humanist, and his figures, as Mr. Fothergill observed, are
blended with or growing out of his rocks and mountains. If lanes-
who revered John- owed the presence of figures in his own land
scape to his example he imparted his own vision of landscape to
his friend.
1 The Tate Gallery, London. 2 Coll. The Hon. Lady Ridley.
CoU. Major Peter Harris. * Coll Mr. Hugo Pitman
6 CoU. Mr. Hugo Pitman.
JAMES DICKSON INNES 73
During the last two or three years of his life he was haunted by
the knowledge of how near the end must be, and that, in conse
quence, he would have almost no time to realize in its fulness the
vision of landscape which he must have known, modest as he was,
to be both original and poetic, and that, moreover, his avid sense of
experience must be largely unsatisfied. The twofold urge to create
and to experience was sharpened by the stimulating nature of his
illness, and because he spent his time among companions who, how
ever devoted in other respects, had little care for his health, or none
at all, his thirst for alcohol encountered no restraint. Unable to live
and work in quiet he spent his evenings at the Cafe Royal, music-
hall and theatre, and his expedition on the way home from the
Pyrenees to Marseilles for an assignation with so unusually robustly
constituted a companion as Augustus John was bad for his health.
John, who took him to the Hotel Bozio, at Ste. Chamas, on the
Etang de Bcrre, seeing how ill he was, advised him, he tells us, to
return to England, which he did. 1
Innes's admirers could wish that John had given a fuller account of
him in 'Chiaroscuro', but the few pages he devotes to his friend are
excellent. He begins with a description of him:
He himself cut an arresting figure, [it runs] a Quaker hat, a coloured
silk scarf, and a long overcoat set off features of a slightly cadaverous
cast, with glittering black eyes, a wide sardonic mouth, a prominent
nose and a large bony forehead, invaded by streaks of thin, black hair.
He carried an ebony cane with a gold top, and spoke with a heavy
English accent, which had been imposed on an agreeable Welsh sub
stratum. 2
This description is amplified by Schwabe:
He was of middle height, black haired and thin featured, handsome to
many people, though others must have regarded him differently, since,
when I was away from London for a while, and lent him my rooms in
Howley Place, my charwoman, on my return, assured me that he was,
literally, 'the devil', and she was undoubtedly terrified of him. 3
Mr. Fothergill calls his voice 'low and melodious', and himself
'affectionate and easily led as one who wanted help to get through
life's effort'.
1 'Chiaroscuro, Fragments of Autobiography*, First Scries, 1952, p. 205.
2 IbicL, p. 202, 3 'The Burlington Magazine', January 1943.
74 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
John proceeds to a revealing account of an expedition he made in
the Spring of 1911 at Innes's invitation to the Arenig valley north of
Bala.
Our meeting at Arenig [John recollects] was cordial, yet I seemed to
detect a certain reserve on his part: he was experiencing, I fancy, the
scruples of a lover on introducing a friend to his best girl-in this case,
the mountain before us, which he regarded, with good reason, as his
spiritual property. ... At this time [he continues] limes' activity was
prodigious; he rarely returned of an evening without a couple of panels
completed. These were, it is true, rapidly done, but they usually meant
long rambles over the moors in search of the magical moment. Perhaps
he felt he must hasten while there was time to make these votive
offerings to the mountains he loved with religious fervour. 1
They left the inn, Rhyd-y-fen, and took a cottage, a few miles
distant, by the brook called Nant-ddu, which looked out on Arenig.
Here they returned the following year and yet again.
Innes's extreme susceptibility to beauty made him hardly less
responsive to women than to mountains, though to no woman, I
think, was he as constant as to Mount Arenig. Of his romantic
attachments John has several stories to tell. He describes Innes's
enchantment, in a bar at Corwen, with Udina, a lovely young gypsy
of the rare tribe of Florence, and how next day he rose early to
rejoin the Florences, and finding them gone followed on foot until,
on the outskirts of Ruthin, he was discovered collapsed by the
roadside. More characteristic still is the account he gives of Innes's
relations with a singer known as 'Billy', a girl who 'had some beauty,
much good nature, and an American accent contracted in Soho'.
To her Innes became very much attached, though his feelings, in
John's opinion, were more chivalrous than passionate.
At this time [he relates] he had acquired a caravan from a gypsy, and
this was resting in the yard of an inn in the remote village of Pcn-
machno. Burning with romantic zeal, he resolved to extricate Billy
from a life in which the Cafe Royal played too great a part, and at last
gained her consent to accompany turn to North Wales, where they
would take to the open road, and travel the world together in healing
contact with Nature and the beneficent influences of his beloved
mountains. They were approaching their destination; Dick, greatly
moved, pointed through the carriage window, crying 'Billy, look, the
mountains of Wales!' but Billy, immersed in 'Comic Cuts', was not
1 Op. cit., p, 203.
JAMES DICKSON INNES 75
to be disturbed. They reached Penmachno and spent several days at the
inn. From time to time Dick would suggest a visit to the yard to inspect
their future wheeled home, but Billy, refusing to budge, only called for
another whisky and soda.
They soon returned to London and the Cafe Royal. Some years
later, being at Penmachno, I saw Innes's van or what was left of it It
had never been moved: some fragments of its wheels still protruded
from the ground.
But his last and deepest attachment was to Euphemia Lamb. They
met in a Paris cafe, and Innes at once responded to the beauty of her
pale oval face, classical in feature yet animated by a spirit passionate,
reckless and witty, and the heavy honey-hued hair: a beauty pre
served in many paintings and drawings by her artist friends, most
notably, perhaps, in a tiny drawing in pen and ink 1 by John, but even
now not extinct. Together Innes and Euphemia made their way,
largely on foot, to his favourite resorts on the foothills of the
Pyrenees, and back to London, he contributing to their support by
making drawings in cafes and she by dancing. Their attachment
lasted until his death. He used to write verse in her honour and
design and make jewellery for her adornment.
Innes himself was alternately depressed and exhilarated, idle and
industrious, and as soon as he emerged from a period of sterile
melancholy he was prone to recklessness. One day when Horace
Cole, noted as a friend of painters and the great practical joker of the
age, was on his way abroad, he was accompanied to the Victoria
Station by Innes and, according to Schwabe's published account,
'one or two intimates'.
In the taxi-cab [it proceeds] they bethought themselves of the rite of
'blood brotherhood*, and at once put it into practice. They mingled
their blood freely enough. Innes drove a knife right through his left
hand. One of the others stabbed himself in the leg and was laid up for
some time afterwards. Cole made a prudent incision, sufficient to
satisfy the needs of the case. The driver was indignant when he saw the
state of his cab and its occupants, but the rite had been performed and
no lasting damage was done.
The *one or two intimates* of the published account of the
incident, and he who stabbed himself in the leg, according to
Schwabe's verbal account earlier referred to, were the same person,
* Coll. Mrs, Edward Groves.
76 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
namely Augustus John, who was also the instigator of this revival of
the rite. An impulsive quixotism used to involve Innes in brawls.
A mutual friend told me that he once accompanied him to some
Parisian night-haunt, out of which he was thrown a few moments
afterwards and presently arrested, and that he had gone to the
magistrate and managed to secure his friend's release. Parted from
every franc with which they had set out, and ravaged by the night's
adventures, the two friends sat morosely together-feet to head-on
a divan in the friend's studio. 'Well, I shall simply lie here, 5 said
Innes, 'until funds arrive from London.'
During his last years 'his teeth suffered', wrote Schwabe, 'and I
doubt if he could masticate properly'. In Fitzroy Street, where he
lived for a time, he was so low that he seemed incapable of getting
out of bed in the morning without a stiff dose of brandy which a
friend would fetch from 'The Yorkshire Grey'. His paintings and
drawings, according to Schwabe's account, were neglected no less
than his health: he left them about in improbable places, and they
were bought only by a few friends and admirers, 1
Even within hailing distance of death, at Mogador in North
Africa, where he had been taken by his friend Trelawney Dayrell
Reed in a last desperate attempt to arrest the progress of his malady,
Innes occupied himself in experimenting with various combinations
of tobacco. 2
In 1914 he went to Brighton where he was nursed devotedly by
his mother. With Horace Cole John visited him there; the war had
broken out, and John recalls the general excitement over it, and the
indifference of Innes, who took no interest in anything except his
medicine. At last he was moved to a nursing-home at Swanley in
Kent. Here also the two friends went to see him in company this
time with Euphemia Lamb.
The meeting of these two was painful, [wrote John] we left them alone
together: it was the last time I saw him. Under the cairn on the summit
of Arenig Dick Innes had buried a silver casket containing certain
correspondence: I think he always associated Euphemia with this
mountain, and would have liked at the last to lie beside the cairn. 3
1 'The Burlington Magazine', January 1943.
2 A Short Appreciation, by Augustus E. John, in the 'Catalogue of Watercolour
Drawings and Paintings', by the late James Dickson Innes, Memorial ^Exhibition,
The Chenil Galleries, April-June 1923. 3 'Chiaroscuro*, pp. 205-6.
JAMES DICKSON INNES 77
When he died on 22 August 1914 at the age of twenty-seven he was
buried instead at Whitechurch, Tavistock, along, now, with both
his parents.
Innes died too early to infuse his own poetic spirit into English
painting. He had one disciple, the Australian-born and Slade trained
painter Derwent Lees, whom he took with him to Collioure. Lees
left at least one work of great beauty in the Innes tradition, Pear
Tree in Blossom, 1 of 1913, but he was ambitious of quick success and
to this end adapted himself to the styles of John and McEvoy as well
as Innes, and before he could form a personal style his mind became
deranged.
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
L. S. LOWRY
b. 1887
I HAVE introduced the artists considered in these pages in the order
of their birth, as I explained in the Preface to the first volume, so
as to avoid groupings, which are more apt to obscure than to
clarify. But had I decided to consider them instead as members of
groups, and had associated Steer and Sickert as 'English Impres
sionists', say, and Lewis, Roberts and Wadsworth as 'Vorticists',
there would be no group in which Lowry could appropriately be
placed. He occupies, in most respects, a position as remote from any
contemporary as Gwen John; in fact farther removed, for however
personal her treatment of them there is nothing novel about her
subjects, whereas his constitute a modest landmark in the history of
the concept of the beautiful. Lowry's remoteness from his English
contemporaries does not arise from any want of harmony with his
surroundings. When Sickert wrote 'The artist is he who can take a
flint and wring out attar of roses,' he had Spencer Gore in mind, but
his words apply more forcibly to Lowry. One of the most persistent
characteristics of the whole modern movement in painting, traceable
as far back as Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox and Anatomy Lesson and
beyond, has been a continuous extension of those aspects of life
deemed to constitute permissible subjects for art, of the conception
of 'the beautiful' in short. Step by step the idea that beauty resided
in the artist's vision asserted itself against the classical view that
beauty was an attribute, sometimes a measurable attribute, of things
themselves. The classical ideal, supported by the authority of Greek
and Renaissance art, did not die. It remains, coherent and compre
hensive, and it still retains a hold, obscurely recognized, over the
hearts and minds of civilized men. It would be foolish to dismiss the
possibility that a day may come when that appeal will once again be
imperative, but for the present the tide still runs in the contrary
direction, and artists are more preoccupied with the discovery
of beauty in subjects hitherto regarded as ugly-with wringing
attar of roses from flint- than in the representation of subjects
78
L. S. LOWRY 79
beautiful-in-themselves. Sickert's description applies to Lowry with
peculiar aptitude because Lowry has not, like Gore, simply subscribed
to the widely held view expressed by Sir Winston Churchill that
'once you begin to study it, all Nature is equally interesting and equally
charged with beauty', 1 but with an audacity that should appeal to
Sir Winston he has annexed to the kingdom of beauty what are
probably the ugliest regions that have ever disfigured the surface of
the earth, the industrial suburbs of Manchester and Salford. It was in
the North of England that the Industrial Revolution began. As the
dark satanic mills sprang up in dense clusters along the valleys of
South Lancashire and South and West Yorkshire, the traditional life
of the surrounding country underwent a rapid process of disintegra
tion and whole populations were drawn into the industrial vortex.
The problem of their housing was mostly left to the uncontrolled
activities of the speculative builder. The kind of building that these
circumstances brought into being in Manchester in the 1840'$ is thus
described in a contemporary official report:
An immense number of small houses ... of the most superficial
character ... are erected with a rapidity that astonishes people un
acquainted with their flimsy structure. They have certainly avoided the
objectionable mode of forming underground dwellings but have . . .
neither cellar nor foundation. The walls are only half a brick thick . . .
and the whole of the materials are slight and unfit for the purpose. . . .
They are built back to back; without ventilation or drainage; and, like
a honeycomb, every particle of space is occupied.
In order to accommodate the rapidly growing population whole
great areas of the industrial north were densely covered by rows of
such houses, divided from one another by what a contemporary
called 'that mass of filth that constitutes the street'.
As the nineteenth century drew towards its close successful efforts
were made to ameliorate conditions in this densely packed mass of
rotting rat-infested houses. Typhus and cholera are gone and the
old houses replaced, and efficient drainage and innumerable other
amenities have been introduced. Yet those areas which felt the first
horrifying impact of industrialization bear to this day the seared
imprint of it, and they will in all probability continue to bear it for
generations. This imprint, which reveals itself in an architecture
1 'Painting as a Pastime', 1948.
80 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
bleak, meagre and disorderly, in an atmosphere sombre and grimy,
in a humanity that serves the forges, the looms and the glowing
furnaces of the great mills, this imprint is the subject of Lowry's art.
His distillation of beauty from the shabbiest and meanest subjects
that the world has to offer is in harmony with the spirit of his age,
but his choice of the locality in which he performs this remarkable
operation is an anachronism. The prevailing tendency towards
centralization is faithfully reflected in the world of art. Most artists
who regard themselves as 'avant-garde', no matter whether they
belong to Salford or Sioux City, are affiliated (if only on a 'country-
member' or even a correspondence-course basis) to the huge and
brilliantly advertised School of Paris. This school has no accepted
style. The principal requirement for membership is to-day little more
than the ability to imitate the superficial elements in the style of one
or other of its original masters-Picasso or Braque, Matisse or Gris.
It is desirable that the imitation should be carried out, at any rate for
a time, in Paris itself. Should this prove impossible, then it should be
done in London or New York but on no account in Salford or Sioux
City. Centralization is now so complete that even members of lesser,
more traditional schools, no longer practise their art in the places
where they happened to be born. As soon as they can afford to do so
they take the journey to London (or Paris or New York) from which
few of them ever return. When they have established their reputation
they may safely and even profitably settle in some picturesque rural
dependency of die capital.
So compelling are the attractions for artists of a few great cities
and so pitifully meagre the patronage of provincial cities that it is
in these few major centres that the fine arts to-day arc exclusively
produced, and for the most part, it need scarcely be added, in the
closest conformity with the styles and sentiments that prevail there.
Regional art- except as practised by those who, in these bitterly
competitive days, have been unable to 'get away' and been com
pelled to stay disconsolately where they are-no longer exists in
England, except in the person of Lowry. He was born in Man
chester. He has never been to Paris, or anywhere abroad, comes only
occasionally to London which, though he regards it with affection,
leaves him, as an artist, entirely untouched. Let me place on record
the basic facts of his quiet life.
L. S. LOWRY 8l
Laurence Stephen Lowry was born at Old Trafford, Manchester,
on i November 1887, the only child of Robert Stephen Lowry, an
estate-agent and a native of the same city, and his wife Elizabeth,
born Hobson. He attended the Victoria Park School, and at about
the age of sixteen, not long before he left, he began to draw, and
presently he realized that he had no wish to do anything else. Aware
of his shyness and his love of home (and knowing nothing of the
hardships of a painter's career) and sympathizing with his serious
quiet pursuits, his parents raised no objections to his attending the
Manchester School of Art. Here he had the good fortune to meet a
painter named Adolphe Valette, who had come to Lancashire as a
designer to a textile firm and who used to attend the School of Art,
where he was eventually invited to take the life class. 'I can't over
estimate the effect on me at that time/ Lowry once said to me, 'of
the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of the French
Impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris. He
had a freshness and a breadth of experience that exhilarated his
students/ In 1909, three or four years after he began to attend the
Manchester School of Art, Lowry's parents moved out and he with
them (for so long as cither of them lived he remained at home) to
117 Station Road, in Pendlebury, an industrial suburb. The move
was to enable them to be near friends, but the friends died. They
none of them liked the place, and planned to move away, but they
never did, and Lowry continued to live in the house until 1948.
Presently he transferred to the nearer though inferior art school at
Salford. Speaking of the effect upon artists of the pictures they see in
early life, he said to me: 'As a student I admired D. G. Rossetti and,
after him, Madox Brown. The queer thing is, I've never wavered;
they're my two favourite artists still/ 'Yet your admiration for
neither of them is even faintly reflected in your work/ I said. 'No.
I don't believe it shows; nor if you were to ask me, could I tell you
why these two artists are constantly in my mind/
I am unable to form a clear notion of what Lowry's work was like
during his earliest years. Fragments come upon in his studio suggest
that it was characterized by the scrupulous notation of low, rather
muddy tones. It must, I think, have been the painting of a serious
student, but lacking in purpose. In 1916 he had an experience- on
the surface of it a characteristically commonplace experience- that
82 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
gave him, in the winking of an eyelid, a sense of vocation that has
never left him. After his parents' removal to Pendlebury, his dislike
for the place took the form of a half-conscious determination to
ignore it, and he ignored it for seven years. One day he missed a
train from Pendlebury, and as he left the station he saw the Acme
Spinning Company's mill. The huge black framework of rows of
yellow-lit windows stood up against the sad damp-charged after
noon sky. The mill was turning out and hundreds of little pinched,
black figures, heads bent down (as though to offer the smallest
surface to the whirling particles of sodden grit) were hurrying across
the asphalt square, along the mean streets with the inexplicable
derelict gaps in the rows of houses, past the telegraph poles, home
wards to high tea or pubwards, away from the mill without a back
ward glance. Lowry watched this scene (which he had looked at
many times without seeing) with rapture: he experienced an earthly
equivalent of some transcendental revelation. Recalling the experi
ence more than thirty years later he exclaimed to me with wonder,
'And to think that it had never occurred to me to do Manchester
subjects/
Those moments of illumination at the station in 1916 formed him.
From that time he has made it the purpose of his life to represent the
grimmest regions of industrial Manchester and Salford with the
same clarity with which he was privileged to see the Acme Mill It
is characteristic of his patient and laborious spirit that certainty about
his vocation did not lead him to leave the Salford Art School; there
he remained for a further ten years, assiduously drawing from the
antique and the life in order to fit himself the better to pursue it.
'I always enjoyed the antique: there's a nobility about it/ he said to
me, 'but the life: I never was so stirred by that/ This lack of interest
is reflected in his work. When he represents human figures as
distant marionettes he is able to endow them with a bleak but highly
expressive animation, as they loiter in the neighbourhood of a street
accident or at the door of a surgery or chapel or as they mill around
a playground, but when he represents them 'close-up', on account
of his want of interest in the living human body, as well as his un
certain grasp of form, he invariably fails. But his is also a radically
lonely spirit; as he once said, he feels cut off from normal human
communication.
L. S. LOWRY 83
During all these years at art schools he worked only at what
seemed to him to be of value, equipping himself as a painter, but he
never completed a set course. Immediately after his eyes had been
opened to their esoteric yet touching beauties he began to make
paintings of the industrial suburbs of Manchester. Although his
dedication to these subjects has remained almost constant -indeed
his occasional aberrations have served to emphasize his constancy -
his way of treating his subject has changed. Writing about a Lowry
exhibition in 1945 the art critic of 'The Times' expressed the opinion
that in other circumstances the artist might have been 'a Wiganish
kind of Corot'. This telling phrase precisely describes not his poten
tialities but what in fact he had already been. His early landscapes,
instinct with a kind of gloomy lyricism, put one very much in mind
of Corot. Lowry's colours are smoky instead of limpid or silvery
like Corot's, but there is the same reticent candour, the extraordinarily
precise perception of values, the refinement in colour, and something
too of the same humility of spirit. In these early canvasses he shows
one characteristic which has become very uncommon: a way of
handling paint as though it were precious.
Contemporary painters are apt to be suspicious of 'quality' too
deliberately sought and made an end of instead of accepted as a
happy but almost accidental consequence of the successful pursuit of
larger aims, in the same way as contemporary writers are of 'fine
writing'. No painter was ever less 'precious' in his outlook than
Lowry, freer from preoccupation with 'finish'; or with pigment for
its own sake, with the 'cookery' of painting. He handles paint as
though it were precious because respect-respect for the rights, the
talents, the convictions, the privacy of his fellow men, for nature
and for the objects of daily use-is a sentiment that Deeply colours
his outlook. No painter whom I have known has been more con
sciously aware of a sense of privilege, amounting almost to a sense
of wonder, at being a painter, and any attitude but one of respect for
his medium would be out of harmony with his thinking and his
feeling.
During his years as a * Wiganish Corot' he painted Manchester and
Salford subjects very tenderly, showing, as already noted, an
extraordinarily sensitive perception of values, and a power of
exquisite modulation within a narrow range of colours and tones: a
84 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
few drab greens, burnt sienna, umber, all seen as it were through a
light screen of industrial smoke. His subjects were often taken from
the less ugly aspects of these cities; he showed a preference for those
areas where a few trees might belatedly put forth a little frost
bitten foliage, or a few blades of grass push hopefully upwards
through the smooth-trodden black earth. Good examples of the
'Wiganish Corot' period are the Salford Art Gallery 1 and Peel Park,
Salford, 2 both of 1924. But as the vision he had at Pendlebury
eventually permeated every part of his being, the search for foliage
and blades of grass seemed to him a little absurd. If he wanted to
paint foliage and grass, he reflected, he could take a tram out to
where they grew unstunted; if he wanted to paint Manchester and
Salford why should he take for subjects what, of all things, was least
characteristic of them? So he looked these two appalling places full
in the face, and concerned himself more and more exclusively with
their most characteristic features: the massive mills and the con
trastingly flimsy dwellings of those who worked in the mills; the
grim twilight areas of disorderly dereliction; the chapels, the pubs,
the sweetshops, where they try to forget their work. It is significant
that he rarely painted the most modern mills, and never, I think, the
new housing estates, for his real subjects are the bleak pervasive
vestiges of the Industrial Revolution. Lowry never represents what
he has not seen, yet what he shows us is not a portrait of our own
age of equality and planning, when the impact of relievable mis
fortune is pillowed by social security, when a drab uniformity is
replacing squalid disorder. Squalid disorder is what he constantly
depicts, and the poverty that accompanied the production of wealth
on a scale incomparably greater than any previous age had known -
a poverty measured not only in terms of wages but in terms of life
itself. There were no splendid church services or civic spectacles -no
symbolic marriage of the Mayor of Manchester to the Ship Canal;
no civic games, no complex of beautiful public buildings such as
ameliorated the harshness of life in earlier civilizations.
The traditional belief that emotions are best expressed by colour
and ideas by line does roughly correspond to the truth. So long as
he was impelled by a vague desire to represent the seemliest frag
ments of a hideous environment-a corner of a park, or the classical
1 Whereabouts unknown. 2 The City Art Gallery, Salford.
L. S. LOWRY 85
portico of a public building -Lo wry could rely upon his delicate
sense of colour and tone. But once he came to see Manchester and
Salford as creations of man, huge complex industrial organisms, his
subject became not scenes sought out because they were pleasant,
but man in his environment. It was a subject that called, inevitably
and imperatively, for the expression of ideas. For such a purpose even
the most delicate perceptions of colour and tone are of little help.
What he required was a more expressive and, above all, a more
exact language of paint, and first and foremost the ability to draw.
When I began to meditate upon the work of Lowry with the view
to writing these pages about him, I looked forward to doing justice
to a man dedicated to a forbidding subject and personally lonely and
obscure. To a man for whom I feel affection; to painting which I
believe has a unique place in the art of its time. Such, however, are
the difficulties of writing about living men that I find that, in the case
of Lowry, doing justice involves initially a degree of depreciation.
Singularly enough, in the course of the little that has been written
or broadcast about him, he has been unwisely praised. Mr. Eric
Newton, for example, has said of him, 'He is not an artist of the first
rank; that is to say, he is not a Titian, a Rembrandt or a Velazquez
. . . but he is among the first of the artists of the second rank,' and he
proceeded to link him with Constable and Brueghel. 1 On another
occasion he wrote that Xowry's Pendleton [as Mr. Newton here
and elsewhere calls Pendlebtiry] is as positive and convincing as
Constable's East Bcrgholt/ 2 Such excessive praise is a consequence
of a generous impulse, but I know of no standard of values according
to which Lowry could be placed among the first in a class which
would include Goya, Degas, Botticelli, Poussin, Diirer, Brueghel or
Constable. Or of any according to which he would stand in relation
to such masters otherwise than as a domestic cat to tigers. He has the
misfortune to be born into an era of decline, when great traditions
have been lost, It is, I think, doubtful whether there is a single
painter now alive to whom we could assign without misgiving a
foremost place in the second rank. It is possible to do justice to
Lowry only if such indefensible claims are taken not as criticism but
as gestures of encouragement.
1 At opening of the artist's first Exhibition in Manchester, 25 October 1948.
2 'The Sunday Times', 18 February 1945.
86 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
In his search for a means of expression adequate to his enlarged
and intensified vision of surrounding life Lowry made two dis
coveries: that his drawing and his composition were elementary.
He was unable to make his forms solid or exact, and his arrangement
of them were often marred, for example, by intrusive horizontals,
sometimes along both foreground and horizon, that are not only
clumsy but destructive of any illusion of space. His paintings often
looked like back drops.
There was no second revelation: Lowry's highly personal style is
the product of his unceasing struggle with two radical shortcomings.
The full power of creating solid form he has never acquired, but he
has so far overcome his inability to compose, except with the
simplest forms, as to enable him in happy moments to represent even
panoramic subjects spaciously and variously.
Art is a mysterious pursuit, without laws (except, perhaps, for a
few bye-laws), and I cannot explain how it comes about that in the
heat of his encounter with what ought to have been crippling dis
abilities Lowry is able to forge the means of giving the most con
vincing form to what he divined that afternoon at Pendlebury
station. 'The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and
unlovely actualities,' wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1916 to a friend, 1 *is
a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie. Everything can go, but
this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes
poetry today.' I think there could be no better description of the
fundamental virtue which makes the best of Lowry's work memor
able. As memorable, in its way, as that of Utrillo, one of the very
few of his contemporaries with whom he is at all closely comparable.
The colour of Utrillo (in his earlier days) was far richer and more
various than Lowry's ever was, his sense of form subtler, larger; but
Lowry, with his narrower means, evokes the life of a city even more
pungently and more completely, and with a richer humanity- a
city, it must be remembered, almost formless, almost colourless, and
so far more refractory than Paris as a painter's subject. The more
abysmal the ugliness, it might be said, the greater the beauty that may
be distilled from it. From time to time Lowry has been classed as a
'Sunday painter', a species of amateur that is to say. An amateur may
achieve something in constantly depicted cities like Paris or London,
1 Catherine Carswcll.
L. S. LOWJRY 87
Venice or New York, but to transmute into art a huge featureless
tract of industrial dereliction, and without the guidance of pre
decessors, is a feat beyond amateur powers.
On account of the stony directness of his statements about what
Lawrence called 'stark and unlovely actualities', Lowry is sometimes
regarded as a satirist moved by indignation or a social reformer
moved by pity. In fact he is neither. 'People in Manchester/ he has
said to me more than once, 'are as happy as people anywhere else.'
He stands in a singular relationship to his subject; a relationship
which he could not, I think, put into words, and which I confess I
do not fully make out. I have never heard him express any particular
opinion about Manchester or Salford. On one occasion we were
speaking of an article which attributed to him pity and other senti
ments towards his subjects. He turned towards me in emphatic
protest: 'I don't feel anything. Anything at all. I simply paint. Of
course/ he continued, 'I must have unconscious feeling/ With
characteristic modesty he disclaims the intellectual power to analyse
his feelings, much more to expound them. He is a man who feels
and meditates but who forms few decided general ideas. He has
reached, for instance, no conclusions about religion or politics,
'though I spend a lot of time/ he said, 'thinking about them*.
'Occasionally I like to see pictures/ he said in answer to some
question of mine, 'but only occasionally.' But I have never known a
painter quicker than Lowry to discern the good qualities in any
pictures in which they are to be found. What he lacks in the way of
intellectual penetration is made up by the most intense and affec
tionate observation of his subject. In a general sense his subject is
the industrial area of South Lancashire, and by extension poor
industrial regions anywhere, but it exists for him in its most com
pelling form in a particular, a strictly local sense, namely an area
immediately adjacent to the Oldham Road, formed by Rockford
Road, Apollo Street, Livesey Street, Mozart Square, Butler Street,
Elizabeth Street, Woodward Street, Kemp Street (late Prussia
Street) and Redhill Street (late Union Street) beside the canal. To
this district he goes every day except Saturday and Sunday, and
spends the middle hours walking the streets, making pencil notes on
the backs of envelopes, occasionally a careful drawing, but mostly
just observing. 'I don't know a soul in this district, but I love it more
88 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
than any place I can imagine/ he said, 'especially this street' (it was
along Union Street that we were walking at the time), 'and Wood
ward Street and the footbridge over the canal. And when the idea
for a painting has come to me, I hurry home and put it down/ He
usually spends few hours painting; a short time early in the morning,
longer at night. Sometimes he works through the night 'without
getting tired/ he said; 'at night I lay in my design and put down my
colour in a general way, but I never work on detail or: finish any
thing by artificial light/ His method is to paint straight on to a white
canvas without an undersketch. Sometimes he improvises out of his
vast detailed repertory of observations, 'without the slightest idea of
what I'm going to do'. More often he works from drawings made
in the street. Some of his paintings are transpositions, others faithful
renderings. Dwellings, Ordsall Lane, Salford, 1 of 1927, for instance,
was made from a fairly detailed chalk drawing. 2 How faithful a
rendering the painting is I was able to see one midsummer afternoon
in 1951 when I stood, with Lowry, lashed by rain from a slaty sky
on the place where the drawing was made.
Usually Lowry is occupied with about twenty subjects at the same
time. A big painting, worked on intermittently, takes him about
eighteen months to complete. Only rarely does he paint directly
from his subject. After the main lines of the composition have been
drawn in black paint, he puts in the colour, mixed with a little
medium, gradually building up to the required quality and pitch,
always keeping on the light side.
Mr. Newton once said that 'Lancashire is to him what a crippled
child is to a devoted mother, . . / 3 This is a matter about which it
would be unwise to be dogmatic, but so far from sharing Mr.
Newton's opinion I believe that far from regarding his subject with
pity Lowry is to an extraordinary degree dependent upon it. He is
entirely aware of the ugliness of this region, but I have never heard
him allude to it in terms of pity. (A few pages back I noted his
insistence that Manchester people were as happy as people anywhere
else.) His attitude appears to me to be one simply of fascination and
love, that has grown year by year until it has him almost enslaved.
1 The Tatc Gallery, London.
2 The Tate Gallery, London, presented by the artist.
3 L, S. Lowry, a broadcast by Mr. Eric Nt k wton, 14 November 1948.
ll **
L. S. LOWRY 89
Not only is he drawn into the Oldham Road district every day when
there is a bus service from Mottram in Longendale, the nearby
village where he has lived since 1948, but in times of despondency
he is able to regain his tranquillity only by walking its streets.
There's one street, [he told me] Juno Street, that I couldn't paint, as it
has no distinctive feature at all. Yet in my studio my mind turns to it
constantly. I don't know why, but I am grateful to that street that I
shan't ever paint. In fact, it's not too much to say that in bad times it's
this district that keeps me going.
For many years he has been aware of his singular dependence.
In the middle 'thirties Pendlebury, where he had spent almost all
his working life, ceased to have any interest for him, but he found
that the attraction of Oldham Road was undiminished. 'After a
little time in the country or by the sea,' he said, 'I have to go back.'
One of his attempts to break the spell of the Oldham Road added
to the range of his art. In 1944 he went to Anglesey. 1 was bored
almost to death. I couldn't work. I could hardly even look at any
thing. A month after I had got home I started to paint the sea that
I'd seen, nothing but the sea. But a sea with no shore and no boat
sailing on it- only the sea.' Just as he goes in times of depression to the
Oldham Road, so in times of loneliness away from home he finds
comfort in the poor quarters of any industrial town. C I go round
quite a bit, and I know the poor quarters of many English cities and
of Glasgow, but it's only round the Oldham Road that I am entirely
alive. I wish,' he said, looking round the sitting-room of 4 The Elms',
his little stone house in Stalybridge Road, Mottram, 'there was a
week-end' bus service into Manchester. Mottram's a nice place, but
I'm lost in the country.'
Lowry's sea-pieces -featureless stretches of smooth water-reveal
as no other of his pictures the exceptional directness and intensity of
his perceptions. The work of so many painters is marked by a false
simplicity, a simplicity that results not from an authentic breadth of
vision, nor from a tension between the desire to include and the
necessity to exclude, but simply from emptiness of mind, from an
unjustifiable esteem of simplicity as an end in itself. The sea-pieces
of Lowry are models of simplification; not only ships and shores and
clouds but even big waves are excluded so that the artist may press
nearer to expressing the essential nature of the sea. With this subject
90 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
he is troubled neither by his uncertain draughtsmanship nor his
difficulty in composing: his exact perception of tone and colour is
enough, and the little canvasses, half sky, half sea with neat lines of
blackish ripples, exert a mesmeric effect.
In the Spring of 1951 1 spent an afternoon visiting dealers' galleries
with Mr. Graham Greene. In one of these we were shown paintings
by Tintoretto, by Degas, and by other illustrious masters, but his
attention remained upon a tiny canvas, divided almost exactly in two
by a horizontal line, the upper half stained with a faint grey and the
lower with a dusky green, an early seascape by Lowry which he
bought and insisted on carrying promptly away.
In Manchester Lowry has a few close friends, and in the Salford
Art Gallery he has found intelligent and loyal support, for in this
institution is assembled the best collection of his work in public
possession. Nevertheless he leads a lonely life, 'with fourteen clocks
for company'. Departure from the neighbourhood would, however,
be impossible, so dependent is he on the Oldham Road, and this not
only for his subjects but as a point of contact with the world. This
is the world, and the only one, in which he has roots. I have already
commented that Lowry's is an essentially lonely spirit and intimated
that this personal characteristic it may be which, more than a simple
lack of interest in the living human body, accounts for his failure
in the depiction of the figure. He feels himself unable to com
municate in the normal ways with other human beings and con
fesses himself correspondingly unhappy; it may be that here is a clue
to the explanation of the bleakness of the human elements in his
pictures. The industrial north is indeed, or was, no less bleak and
grim and chilling in all its non-human environment than it is in
them. Among the people who live there, however, these qualities
are conspicuously lacking; instead there is warmth and easy gregari-
ousness and an abundance of community feeling. But in Lowry's
work, as a writer in 'The Observer' has commented, there is a wist
ful and melancholic quality.
His figures are often pathetic-not because they are poor or stunted or
shabby but because they are lost souls, unable to communicate. The
Lowry landscape, though it has a pale sad beauty of its own, is a lost
landscape Places are transmuted in his mind and come out strange
and far away. 1 i A
J * 14 August 1955.
L. S. LOWRY 91
He has no other world; he could never leave it. In his earlier years,
even had he had the wish, departure would have been difficult: out
side the Manchester region he was unknown, and even within it, in
spite of the encouragement of the 'Manchester Guardian', he re
mained little known until the early 'thirties when the circle of his
admirers widened. It was not until 1939 when Mr. McNeill Reid,
of Messrs. Reid and Lefevre, happened to see some pictures of his at
a framer's, and was so impressed by their originality that he arranged
an exhibition of Lowry's work, that his name came to be known
outside his own locality. I well remember the impression that
Lowry's pictures made on myself, for whom a six-year sojourn in a
region that had much in common with his Salford had ended only
the year before. Six years in the West Riding were long enough to
get to know it and not long enough for the sharpness of the im
pression to blur. I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of
the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the
bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the
grimness of northern industrial England. It was as a connoisseur of
all this that his pictures held me fascinated; only when the fascination
of the subject had a little subsided were the beauties of these scenes
as paintings borne in upon me. I chose for submission to the Tate
Trustees the picture that summed up remorselessly yet with tender
ness the industrial north I knew so well. This was Dwellings, Ordsall
Lane, Salford.
The exhibition brought Lowry a modest national reputation that
has grown steadily since. It is a reputation that is surely merited: out
of the ceaseless struggle of this man with no more than moderate
natural abilities to express, with 'the stark directness' of which
Lawrence spoke, his vision of surrounding life, has come an art
singularly dignified and, above all, singularly human.
PAUL NASH
18 891946
BARELY ten years have passed since Paul Nash died, and his
reputation has scarcely had time to assume its final form. Yet
already touches are added, year by year, to a portrait of the
artist which portrays him as more certain of his way, more sustained
and logical in his growth, than the facts would seem to suggest.
'Nash's development as a painter remained singularly consistent
throughout his life/ 1 wrote his friend E. H. Ramsden, and a little
earlier in the same essay she alludes to him as a water-colourist 'who
must be acknowledged to have been supreme'. 2 Of the sequence of
four pictures which were his last works, she wrote that 'with the
sublime melancholy of the first and the splendid exaltation of the
second, the life of the painter moves to its triumphant close'. I think
that the assured, rather Olympian genius of Miss Ramsden's study,
who belongs to the great tradition of English landscape painting and
to whose style belongs the quality of grandeur, differs in important
respects from Paul Nash as he was. He differs, at all events, both
from the Paul Nash whom I knew, well but not intimately, for many
years, and, as it seems to me, from the artist as experienced in his
work. It is with some diffidence, however, that I will try to outline
the lineaments of a figure which does not strikingly resemble the
hero of Miss Ramsden's and other studies, for his personality was
more complicated, more allusive than the clear-cut memories
suggest, and his taste was so subtle that it is not always easy to dis
tinguish between the works which are the outcome of deep con
victions and those which he has manufactured out of a tasteful blend
of experience undergone in the shallows. If I seemed just now to
suggest that Miss Ramsden had invented a Paul Nash larger and
more perfect than Paul Nash as he was, I did her an injustice. Her
portrait was derived from another, namely the self-portrait which
1 'Paul Nash, Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations', edited by Margot Eates
with Essays by Herbert Read, John Rothcnstein, E. H. Ramsden and Philip
James, 1948, p. 30. 2 Ibid., p. 23.
Si
K s
s .o
PAUL NASH 93
the artist had constantly in his mind-a portrait clear and complete
down to the smallest detail-which it was his purpose to leave behind
him. But may I say at once that this self-portrait was not conceived
as a disguise? He was both too much of an artist and too much a man
of integrity for that. The clue to his motives is contained in the
following observation by Sir Herbert Read. After noting that his
clothes, although not conventional, were always well cut, and his
studio orderly as a chart-room, he concludes: 'He always dominated
his environment His work was a part of his environment-not an
unrelated activity relegated to some graceless workshop/ If this
exceedingly just observation were understood to include not only
the artist's immediate environment such as clothes, house furnishings
and the like, but also his reputation, as artist and man, that is to say his
situation-living or dead-in the minds of his fellow men, it brings
us nearer to an understanding of Paul Nash's ambition. In her
preface to the memorial volume already quoted from, the editor,
Miss Margot Eates, explaining how it came into being wrote:
When, therefore, the burden of increasing ill-health enforced on him
considerable periods of inaction during the last two years of his life,
he devoted himself in these times of unlocked for, and unwanted,
leisure to the task of compiling from his photographic records a
'Picture Book' . . . which should provide a co-ordinated survey of his
paintings and drawings.
According to my own understanding of Paul Nash he would as
soon have considered leaving the world without leaving, as a
lasting memorial, a Picture Book in which his best work would
be assembled and arranged and presented with all his resources of
taste and skill as a pharoah would have contemplated leaving it
without his pyramid. He did in fact compile a list of the pictures
which he wished included in any posthumous retrospective
exhibition.
Paul Nash compiled his picture book not because he was ill but
because he knew that he was going to die-
Paul Nash was born on n May 1889 at Ghuznee Lodge, now
2 Sunningdale Gardens, in the region of Earl's Court, London, the
elder son of William Harry Nash, Recorder of Abingdon, and his
wife Caroline Maud, daughter of Captain Milbourne Jackson, Royal
Navy. His upbringing was strict. Their father permitted, for example,
P4 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Paul and his brother Jack-John Nash the painter and illustrator -to
draw on Sundays, but, in order to mark the difference from other
days, forbade them to paint. In later years the father deplored their
working on that day, troubled by the thought that a picture made
on the Sabbath might afterwards be sold. The three years, 1904-6,
which Paul Nash spent at St. Paul's School, were years wasted. 'I
was seventeen/ he has told us, 'when the long and complicated
purgatory of my school life came to an end. I emerged from it
impaired in body and spirit, more or less ignorant and equipped for
nothing. My education/ he added, 'only began when I was at
liberty to learn for myself/ 1 He put that liberty to good use. His
purposeful and inquisitive mind not only made itself master of an
unusually wide range of techniques useful to an artist but equipped
itself to move easily in various intellectual spheres as well.
After he had failed to pass the Naval entrance examination and
after his father had failed to enlist him in the respectable professions
of architecture and banking, for which his inability to understand
elementary mathematics disqualified him, he was allowed, and with
his father's blessing, to try to earn his living as an illustrator. In order
to undergo some elementary training he attended the evening classes
at the London County Council technical school at Bolt Court in
Fleet Street. It was thus, through prolonged misery and successive
failures, that Paul Nash found his vocation-a vocation which had
for some time had a vague attraction for him. There is symbolic
significance, although probably no other, in that it was this same
year, 1909, that on a visit to an uncle who lived near Wallingford
he first saw those memorable twin grove-surmounted hills, the
Wittenham Clumps, which later in his life were to become for him
an image of compelling force. But even then they impressed. 'They
were/ he said, 'the Pyramids of my small world/
From the time when he was a child Paul Nash showed an acute
responsiveness to what was strange, and began, as he has told us, *to
exaggerate forms and sounds. So many innocent things . . . began to
have a sinister nature/ 2 Of this his unfinished memoirs and his con
versation afforded many instances. There was a time, for instance,
when he was frightened when the light was put out at night by the
1 'Outline, an autobiography and other writings', by Paul Nash, 1940, p. 72.
2 Ibid., p. 44.
PAUL NASH 95
sound of far-off galloping overhead. One night he cried out to one
of the maids and made her listen. Presently a distant drumming went
softly thudding over their heads. 'It's the rats,' whispered the maid,
'they're hunting, have you heard their horn?' For a long time he was
haunted by the sound, high, thin and faint, of the rats' horn, just as,
years afterwards, he was haunted by the strange words and strange
forms which induced the prolonged periods of agitation so fruitful
for his art.
At the time when he may be said to have begun his life as an artist
his mind was suffused not so much with the strange or sinister as with
the romantic. It was, in particular, subject to the spell, which he
came later to regard as disintegrating, of D. G. Rossetti. He read
Tennyson and Morris, Keats, Whitman, Blake and Coleridge; and
the discovery of each was a fresh, disturbing shock, but Rossetti -
about whom he said he had read everything that had been written,
and whose pictures and poems he knew almost without exception-
remained his mind's presiding genius. He wished to become another
Rossetti, whose example led him for a time to write verse. Such a
work as The Crier by Night, 3 - of 1912, and the figure with the pale
rapt face of Beata Beatrix enfolded in mysterious shadows, is the
work of a Rossetti-intoxicated youth. Slowly, however, Blake
replaced Rossetti as the painter-poet. To Rossetti Paul Nash owed
beyond question a strong imaginative impulse, but upon inanimate
nature, the subject of almost all of Paul Nash's work, Rossetti had
little light to show.
Of recent years the word 'literary' used in reference to the plastic
arts has become an adjective so opprobrious that a writer must
hesitate to use it about a painter unless he is prepared to face an out
cry from the painter's friends. In the present inflamed state of opinion
it would avail a writer nothing to plead the undoubted fact that many
of the masters -Rembrandt and Delacroix to mention two con
spicuously important examples-were literary painters. 'So you'd
try to justify yourself, would you?' he would be likely to be asked,
and his offence long held against him. But if the truth about Paul
Nash is to be told, then there is no avoiding the currently opprobrious
adjective, for he was, and to a marked degree, a painter whose
vision was directed and stimulated by literary conceptions and even
1 Coll. Mrs. Paul Nash.
96 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
by evocative phrases. It is my intention later in these pages to try to
define more closely the nature of the literary incitements; for the
present it is sufficient to state the fact of their positive existence.
Although he was born in London Paul Nash had his roots in the
country, for the Nash family had long been established in Bucking
hamshire. From about the age of twelve he lived mainly in his
ancestral county, but it was not so much the country itself- respon
sive as he was to its beauties -that made him see it intensely as a
subject for his art. This revelation he owed, characteristically, to a
book. It was about 1909 or 1910 that he read 'Lavengro', and the
effect of it was immediate and decisive. Paul Nash has described it in
a passage of special insight and beauty.
To live in those little close rooms of Rossetti's, so charged with the
intense atmosphere of romantic love, produced in me a tingling
sensation in sympathy with his mood. I felt the anguish of those im
prisoned lovers. ... I, too, counted the heart-beats in the silence:
. . . when in the dusk hours (we two alone)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies . . .
But I began to realise that my fixed attention was wandering, that with
the succession of Lancelot and Guinevere, Hamlet and Ophelia, Paolo
and Francesca, a feeling of constriction was invading me and that my
tingle was the exquisite but crippling sensation of pins and needles.
Very slowly, as one must in that predicament, I began to stretch my
cramped limbs and then, very softly, for I felt a renegade, I crept from
the room. I might have spared my caution. No one and no thing
noticed either my presence or its departure. The lovers stayed locked in
their anguished embrace, the chained monkey continued to pick the
rose to pieces, the boarhound of unsure anatomy still slept by the side
of the lance and the shield. On the window-sill the dove lay dead. Out
side the door I passed the frenzied eavesdropper among the shadows.
I emerged into open spaces. Led by the voice of Lavengro I followed
on to the heath. 1
And on the heath he remained, representing it by day and by
night, in winter and summer, tenderly cultivated and liideously
scarred, concerned sometimes with its surface, at others with some
presiding spirit, ever responsive to change in mood and season.
There were several reasons why 'Lavengro' should have held a
fascination so strong for him as to draw him away from all his earlier
1 Op. cit., pp. 78-9.
PAUL NASH 97
preoccupations out on to the heath, but it is reasonable to suppose
that the strongest was the intimations the book has of an English
countryside before it had been tamed: a countryside about which
there was something intractable, wild, mysterious. The book
inspired at least one illustration, a drawing Lavengro and Isopal in the
Dingle, 1 - of 1912, a drawing so deeply felt that the poetry of the effect
far transcends the ineptness of the means apparently used to produce
it. In the process of leading Paul Nash out on the heath 'Lavengro'
had an improbable ally in the shape of Sir William Richmond.
When he showed one of his drawings partly imagined and partly
observed, this elderly academician suddenly exclaimed, 'My boy, you
should go in for Nature/
Like those of most artists the earliest drawings of Paul Nash are
essays in the manner of others, but at Bolt Court he began to see
things in his own way, and to exercise his imagination. He made
among many others a series of drawings showing a wide prospect of
undulating fields backed by a long low range of wooded hills, above
which was suspended a huge girl's face with hair streaming out like
wings on either side. How one of these drawings had far-reaching
effects Paul Nash has himself related. One evening . . . 'there seemed
to be an air of excitement among the students. But before I had time
to investigate, the door opened and a remarkable-looking small
figure entered abruptly. . . . The expression of (his) head was one of
acute intelligence and the carriage almost imperious, as of a person
accustomed to command . . . from the moment that wide judicial
mouth opened a stream of easy, persuasive and ingenious talk flowed
out, full of shrewdness and wit ... the unerring gaze swept the
room. . . .* 2 The imperious figure was my father: the result of his
visit, the award of the maximum marks to Paul Nash's drawing.
Some months later he brought a sheaf of his drawings to my father.
After a little consideration he gave his opinion. 'You should go to
the Slade/ he pronounced, 'and learn to draw.' The suggestion was
accepted as a sound one but Paul Nash pointed out that he could
not expect his father to find the fees. 'Well, then, why not make
them for yourself?' replied Rothenstcin without hesitation. My father
had high expectations for the future of this beginner- truly self-
described as 'without apparent natural talent . . .'-and a friendship
1 Coll. Sir Gerald Kelly. 2 Op. cit, pp. 32, 83.
98 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
grew up between them that was to last until my father's death.
It was Paul Nash's habit to turn to him often for help and advice.
To Selwyn Image, a late survivor of the Pre-Raphaelite movement,
afterwards Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and to the
benevolent poet Gordon Bottomley, 1 he also owed much for their
encouragement in those tentative days.
Assiduity and luck enabled him to enter the Slade in 1910. This
school, by the way, described by so many as the very fountain of
bohemian life, the home of liberty, conviviality and eccentricity,
'differed very little', according to Paul Nash, 'from St. Paul's at its
chilliest'. 2 (He himself contributed to its formality by appearing in
contrast to the prevailing sartorial bohemianism with close-clipped
hair, dark suit, stiff collar and bowler hat.) During the time he spent
there the Slade was in one of its periodic spates of talent, and Stanley
Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth and
C. R. W. Nevinson were all fellow-students. His first encounter
with Tonks he has thus admirably described. 'With hooded stare and
sardonic mouth, he hung in the air above me, like a tall question
mark, backwards and bent over from the neck, a question mark,
moreover, of a derisive, rather than an inquisitive order. In cold
discouraging tones he welcomed me to the Slade. It was evident he
considered that neither the Slade, nor I, was likely to derive much
benefit.' 3
If in spirit he had followed Lavengro on to the heath, his body was
not able to leave the 'close rooms of Rossetti's, so charged with the
intense atmosphere of romantic love', in an instant. At the Slade he
certainly became more and more preoccupied with nature, yet he
continued for some time to lack the means to represent landscape.
Spring at the Hawk's Wood* of 1911, fairly gives the measure of his
incompetence at rendering natural appearance. The Bird Garden^ of
the same year, although it shows hardly more grasp of form, does
give a hint of the special poetry that later on was to animate drawing
after drawing.
In spite of his apparent want of talent and the downright silliness
1 The letters which passed between them were published as *Poct and Painter',
being the correspondence between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash (1910-48),
edited by Claude Colleer Abbott and Anthony Bertram, 1955.
2 Op. cit., p. 90. a ibid., p. 89,
* Coll. Miss Barbara Nash. * Co lL Mr. C. St. J. G, Miller.
PAUL NASH 99
of some of his drawings -Pyramids in the Sea, 1 of 1912, for instance,
which he considered good enough for reproduction in 'Outline' -
the note of strange beauty that, usually in vain, he attempted to utter
could occasionally be heard. And when heard it impressed and
lingered in the memory. Within a year of leaving the Slade he held
his first exhibition at the well known but now long defunct Carfax
Gallery in Ryder Street. Although the purchases had mostly been
made by friends it was a modest success. Of the purchase by my
father Paul Nash has given a touching account which concludes,
'For me at that point in my career it seemed, as if by magic, to change
the aspect of my first real venture from something accorded a
hesitating acceptance into a distinguished triumph and one that had
been recognised by the highest award.' 2 The main acquisition,
Falling Stars, of 1911, which duly took its place on our walls, was the
first work by Paul Nash that I had seen. What is more important is
that, unless I am mistaken, this beautiful drawing is the first in which
the artist's extraordinary responsiveness to the peculiar character
and drama of trees is fully realized. These two trees are, moreover,
enfolded by darkness, with which, in his early years he was deeply
preoccupied.
In the summer of the year following his exhibition, when he
spent a day at my parents' house in Gloucestershire, I made the
acquaintance of the artist himself. Most clearly I remember his cold
very blue eyes, which on first meeting seemed unfriendly -but after
a few minutes his good will was evident. They were exceptional
eyes: their blueness, the steadiness of their gaze, and the habitual
closeness of the pupils to the upper lid gave them the far-ranging
look of the eyes of sailors. His hair was so dense and wavy as almost
to resemble some exotic piece of headgear. He was extremely neatly
dressed. At that time there was no particular contact between us. If
he had been a sailor-so far as we children were concerned-he would
have had a better claim to our attention, but he was simply one more
young artist, bringing his drawings to be looked at, examining the
pictures on the walls, seeking advice. Besides it was evident that he
was uninterested in children, and entirely intent upon fulfilling the
purpose of his visit. Later on when I came to know him it became
apparent to me why in the course of this visit and one or two others
1 Coll. Mrs. Gerald Grimsckle. * Op. cat, p. 128.
ICO MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
I vaguely recall the relations between him and us remained so
tenuous. Driven by their passionate absorption in their work artists
are more than commonly industrious. Intense application with some
is followed by periods of idleness, dissipation or recreation; others
merely vary their work. Corot delighted in fishing for its own sake,
but when Delacroix listened to an opera or a play he deliberately
subjected his imagination to the stimulus that charm afforded. Paul
Nash was one of those who was constantly occupied with his work.
It was not that he drew or painted for more hours at a stretch than
others, but he was interested in every possible aspect of his work,
and when he was not drawing or painting he would photograph
some subject likely to be of use in a composition, he would study
some object he had found-a twisted piece of wood, a stone worn
into a fantastic shape, the skeleton of a leaf- which might serve a
similar purpose; he would project albums of his works, plan for
exhibitions or reproductions, or again he would plan the formation
or the actions of groups of fellow-artists. The most celebrated
example was Unit I, an ephemeral, ideologically bound group of
painters, sculptors and architects, including Wadsworth and Burra,
of which he was the driving-power and whose manifesto he wrote. 1
With such activities and many others of a like kind he was endlessly
occupied. With him the living of life and the pursuit of his pro
fession were inseparably fused. His life as an artist had style: 'He
carried over, with his actual career,' as Sir Herbert Read aptly
observed, 'some of the swagger of the rejected career-art, for him,
was to be the Senior Service/ At the time of Paul Nosh's first visit
to my parents' house none of us children could have had any
relevance at all. Some of those who read these pages may think that
if my account of him is correct he was an ambitious man. Ambitious
he undoubtedly was, but before they condemn him on that account
they should reflect upon how harshly life bears upon painters and
what a difficult business even the most gifted-portrait painters apart
-find it, at times, even to survive.
During the few years bounded by his departure from the Slade
and his involvement in the First World War the work of Paul Nash
assumed a distinct character, almost as dissimilar from that which
preceded it as from that which followed. Which of the traditional
1 Cp. 'Unit F, edited by Herbert Read, London 1934.
d <
PAUL NASH 101
English painters in water-colour pointed the way is uncertain, but
during those years his work assumed a traditional character. He was
too personal an artist to imitate an old master but what he did was
to assimilate something of the spirit of Girtin, Cotman and others,
and to evolve a free contemporary version of traditional idioms.
He seemed destined to follow closely, with intelligence and taste, a
conventional course. English Landscape, his chosen subject, he
represented in its most park-like aspect: green lawns, formal hedge
rows and farms and the elegant intricacies of lofty elm trees were
features which he dwelt on with a peculiar tenderness and com
prehension. In the best of these clearly drawn, firmly if lightly con
structed, brightly but coolly coloured water-colours he struck an
original note. In the less happy are to be readily detected the facile
rhythms of 'art nouveau', which produced so widespread an effusion
of billowy clouds, waves and vegetation, and highly coloured
bubble-like formations of undefined matter. It is odd that a man of
taste ordinarily so discerning should have chosen one such work
Landscape at Wood Lane* of 1914, for inclusion in his autobiography.
During the same years his life opened out in a number of direc
tions: his reputation steadily grew: he became engaged to be
married, and he made many new friends. The outbreak of the First
World War brought this epoch of his life and art to an abrupt end.
He enlisted as a private in the Artists' Rifles in August 1914 and was
detailed for service at home. In the winter of that year he married
Margaret, daughter of the Rev. N. Odeh. In 1916 he was gazetted
2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd Hampshire Regiment, and in February of
the following year he went abroad and was stationed in the Ypres
Salient. What he experienced in that place of desolation made him
an artist as decisively as the scenes of his boyhood by the River Stour
made Constable an artist. When he entered the Ypres Salient he
seemed to be an artist of modest range, who had largely outlived a
somewhat boyish romanticism, which expressed itself in nocturne,
with pyramids, palm trees, shadows of unseen figures, falling stars
and the like, and had become a painter of park-like landscapes, to the
essentially conventional character of which he gave a poetic and
stylish turn. When we look back at the artist of those days with the
knowledge we have of his later work, this originality and stylishness
1 The City Art Gallery, Manchester (Rutherston Coll.).
102 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
are more conspicuous than they were to his contemporaries, but they
were sorely inadequate to ensure the most fleeting survival of his
reputation. There can be little doubt that had he been destined to
take his place among the unnumbered thousands who died in the
Ypres Salient he would have been unremembered, but surviving the
bitter desolation of the place immeasurably deepened his perceptions.
Certain friends of his have from time to time expressed surprise
that an artist who had been so consistently drawn to dwell upon
landscape in its most cultivated and most benign aspects should have
responded to such purpose to the Western Front. It was precisely
this preoccupation that so well prepared him for the fruitful con
templation of that overwhelmingly, perhaps even uniquely, terrible
spectacle. For an artist brought up in such a time as the present,
familiar with bomb-scarred cities and multitudes of refugees
'bombed out', or also, dispossessed of home and property, wander
ing without hope along the unfriendly highroads of the world, the
Western Front would be no more than an impressive reminder of
the evil in man. The impact upon the imagination of a Paul Nash
of this vast desolation of tortured country, churned to mud, pitted
with shell-craters, the grass scorched and trampled, was of the
utmost violence. An artist accustomed to handle nature more
arbitrarily, or familiar with her harsher aspects, might have taken
the spectacle less hardly, but he, who had treated her with such
tender respect, was pierced by a sense of outrage. The man who
loved the intricate tracery of elms had now to contemplate the
shattered stumps of trees without names.
From the first, therefore, almost inevitably the idea took root in
his mind that here was a subject that must be drawn and painted,
and in particular by him, but it would seem that it was in the course
of a conversation with my father that he first envisaged it as within
the bounds of the possible.
I have just got home [he wrote to him on 20 May 1916] and sit down
at once to write to you . . . my wife . . . upbraided me for not jumping
at your idea of drawing in France. I AW jump inwardly, . . . Will you
let me know if you have a definite scheme. . . . The idea has dwelt so
long in my mind and always seemed so impossible that a hint of its
realization excited me tremendously. Please write to me for I am really
roused.
PAUL NASH 103
Soon after he went to the Western Front he began systematically
to charge his memory and, in snatched moments, to make studies.
In April 1917 he went into the front line. After three months in
France and only a few weeks at the Front he had 'the curious for
tune', he reported in a letter to my father, 'to fall suddenly down a
narrow trench and break my twelfth rib. ... I brought back some
twenty drawings from France . . . and . . . have arranged ... to have
a show ?1 The impression made by this handful of drawings upon
such persons as John Buchan, Edward Marsh, Campbell Dodgson,
C. F. Masterman and my father, as well as Paul Nash's own un
ceasing and adroitly conducted campaign in support of his ambition,
resulted in November in his being sent back to France as an Official
Artist. At the Front again, and this time free from military duties,
Paul Nash applied the whole of his time to his work as painter and
draughtsman. The Official Artists held their appointments for
strictly limited periods, but during those few weeks in the autumn
of 1917, densely packed with experience, he worked with extra
ordinary industry, making the very utmost of the facilities placed
miraculously but transiently at his disposition.
Yesterday I made twelve drawings, [he wrote to his wife on 13 Novem
ber] nine of different aspects of one of the most famous battle-fields
in the war. I just missed the battle. . . . 2 1 start off directly after breakfast
and do not get home until dinner-time and after that I work on my
drawings until about eleven o'clock at night when I feel very sleepy
and go to bed. 3
Yet such in these times was his exaltation of spirit that he had the
superabundant energy to write letters to his wife which are at
points nothing less than verbal equivalents of his drawings. The
following passage from the letter just quoted constitutes perhaps
the most expressive of these verbal equivalents, and a statement,
too, of what he conceived to be the current purpose of his work.
I have just returned, last night, from a visit to Brigade Headquarters up
the line, and I shall not forget it as long as I live. I have seen the most
frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than
by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings I
have made I may give you some vague idea of its horror. . . . Sunset
and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black
1 The exhibition, *The Ypres Salient*, was held at the Goupil Gallery in July.
2 Passchendaele. 3 'Paul Nash: Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations', p. 18.
104 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black
of night is a fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the
stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with
green- white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime,
the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the guns never cease. They
alone plunge overhead tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking
the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming,
maddening they plunge into the grave which is the land; one huge
grave and cast upon it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hope
less. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger
who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who
want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message,
but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls. 1
The time which Paul Nash spent at the Front, as soldier and as
Official Artist, amounted in all to little more than two months,
but during that brief spell he experienced life more deeply, more
intensely than most men during the full term of their allotted span.
When he first went to France what most touched him was the
incongruity between the hell of blasted and poisoned earth and mani
festations of an ultimately unconquerable nature:
... in a wood passed on our way up, [he wrote to his wife] a place with
an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds,
often reeking with poison gas-a most desolate and ruinous place two
months back, today was a vivid green, the most broken trees even had
sprouted somewhere and, in the midst, from the depth of the wood's
bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. 2
But it was the hellish aspect of things that quickly filled his mind: he
became ecstatically absorbed in its sinister beauty.
The contemplation of it excited in him- as in thousands of other
soldiers-an insistent preoccupation with the moral issues involved.
He never arrived at a consistent attitude towards the war. At certain
moments he was sickened by its wastage and corruption, and the
moral obliquity that made it possible; at others he was exalted by its
terrible splendour.
In May 1918 the work he had completed as a War Artist was
shown at the Leicester Galleries, under the title 'Void of War'. The
impact of the new works was sharper and wider than that of those
shown at the Goupil the year before; it was generally recognized
that a new figure was now to be numbered among the foremost
1 'Paul Nash: Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations', p. 18. 2 Ibid., p. 15.
PAUL NASH 105
English artists. The workmanlike preface which Arnold Bennett
contributed to the catalogue fairly reflected the impression the
drawings made.
The interpretative value is, to my mind, immense, [he wrote]
Lieutenant Nash has seen the Front simply and largely. He has found
the essentials of it- that is to say disfigurement, danger, desolation, ruin,
chaos -and little figures of men creeping devotedly and tragically over
the waste. . . . Their supreme achievement is that in their sombre and
dreadful savagery they are beautiful.
When Paul Nash, led by the voice of Lavengro, had left the little
close rooms of Pre-Raphaelite romanticism and emerged on to the
heath he was impelled, first and foremost, by his need to find a style.
A style serviceable, evocative and personal, was what he was looking
for, rather than the exceedingly genteel prettinesses of the heath on
which he found himself. There can be no question of the genuine
ness of his response to the beauties of landscape. They richly nourished
his imagination, but they were more important to him in that they
provided the materials out of which he hoped to evolve a style, and
when he arrived in France he had evolved a somewhat tentative one
that promised to become an instrument well fitted to the representa
tion of the park-like and garden-like aspects of landscape which all
but monopolized his attention. The spectacle of the theatre of war
transformed almost instantly his whole conception of style. He was
in the presence of something so vast, of such sombre magnificence,
that the idea of using it as the material for a style seemed to him
a puny blasphemy. Accordingly, in excitement and exultation, he
gave himself up to the humble representation of the awful spectacle
about him. He was scarcely conscious of the problems of style, but
his former preoccupation with them enabled him to select, as it were
instinctively, from the vast chaos extending on every side, precisely
those elements that enabled him to make drawings which embody
the very essence of it, and which live so vividly in the memory. I
know of no works of art made by any artist working there who saw
the splendours and miseries of the greatest of all theatres of war so
grandly. Out of infinite horror he distilled a new poetry. The best
of these war studies, in pastel, water-colour, ink and chalk or in a
combination of them, Canadian War Memorial, Vimy?- of 1918,
1 The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
106 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1 of 191?; Sunrise, Inverness
Copse? of 1918; Dawn, Sanctuary Wood? of 1918; Meadow with
Copse: Tower Hamlets District? of 1918 (Plate 8); Nightfall Zille-
becke District, 5 of 1918; Ruined Country, Old Battlefield, Vimy, Q of
1918, and The Menin Road, 1 of 1918, the large painting in which he
elaborated in tranquillity themes stored up in his memory or else
summarily noted down-these will take their place among the finest
imaginative works of our time.
In a letter which he wrote from the Front line there occur the
words 'I have seen things . . . that would last me my lifetime as food
for paintings and drawings.' Certain of the images that formed in
his mind in the course of his ecstatic contemplation of these desolate,
unearthly landscapes, long outlasting his preoccupation with them,
became permanent features of his vision.
'The headless trees white and withered, without any leaves, done,
dead,' which he had noted in Flanders, transformed by time and the
imagination, became the megaliths, the tree-trunk monsters, fossils,
fungi and other features of the still and timeless country of his later
imaginings.
Chapter VII of the synopsis that he left of his uncompleted auto
biography begins with the words 'struggles of a war artist without
a war'. These words mark no more, perhaps, than his intention to
enlarge upon the difficulties attendant upon changing from an
officially sponsored artist to a demobilized artist left suddenly at
large in a strange unsettled world. It is possible to read in them a
deeper meaning. The change from war to peace production offered
no serious difficulties to a man so resourceful and so determined to
succeed and so newly crowned with laurels. He turned his hand to
new kinds of work: wood engraving, textile designing, writing; he
executed designs for Barrie's 'Truth about the Russian Dancers'.
These activities and many others were interrupted, in. 1921, by a
serious illness. To recuperate he settled at Dymchurch in Dorset.
The allusion to struggles of a war artist without a war seems to me
to have reference not so much to the immediate problem of finding
1 The Imperial War Museum, London. 2 The Imperial War Museum, London.
3 The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool. * Coll. Mr. G. H. Nevili
5 The Imperial War Museum, London. 6 The Imperial War Museum, London.
7 The Imperial War Museum, London.
2>i '311
PAUL NASH 107
employment as to the way in which his vision, deepened and in
tensified by an overwhelming experience, could be realized without
the magnificent subjects which had formed it. To express his response
to the Western Front he had forged an instrument too powerful, too
stark for the depiction of elegant elm trees, neatly fenced fields and
other features of the well ordered and smiling landscape that had
earlier engrossed him. Was he to allow it insensibly to shrink, to
relax? If not, upon what subjects should he direct it without in
congruity? To the first question, for an artist so tenaciously aspiring,
there could be only one answer; to the second I do not believe he
ever discovered an answer that gave him lasting satisfaction. That is
why, near the beginning of this study, I called in question E. H.
Ramsden's claim that his 'development as a painter remained
singularly consistent throughout his life'. To me his development
seems on the contrary to have been rendered erratic and fitful by a
lifelong search for the inspired harmony between form and subject
that marked the best of his war pictures. The search was full of
difficulty, and only from time to time was it successful. On the
Western Front a subject was presented to him which his gifts ideally
fitted him to interpret, but later he was preoccupied with the
realization that in these favoured circumstances he had made works
of art which bore perhaps marks of greatness, and it was therefore
with anxiety as well as delight that he was driven constantly for
ward in search of some new illumination. The problem did not
present itself abruptly, because the principal subject of his attention -
the Dorset coast about Dymchurch- although without the specta
cular character of the Western Front, was a dramatic theme and one
susceptible of fruitful treatment by similar methods and in a similar
spirit. The water-colours he made of that nobly curving coast are to
be regarded rather as the completion of an earlier phase than the
beginning of a new. They are less intense in feeling, but the conditions
in which they were made allowed him a wider choice of viewpoint
and longer time for contemplation. In that the element of con
sciously imposed design is more strongly marked than in anything
he had done hitherto they give an indication of the general direction
he was to follow. A whole series of water-colours came into being
as a consequence of his visit to this stretch of coast, designs calculated
with exquisite precision to express the rhythmic sweep of the shore,
108 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the infinite spaciousness of sea and sky. Such a work as Dymchurch
Strand, 1 of 1922, shows a power of comprehending an immense area
of landscape with the unstrained certainty of Girtin. And it does not
stand alone: Dymchurch Wall, 2 of 1923 , and the more abstract Coast
Scene, 3 of 1921, and Winter Sea* of 1925-37 (Plate 9), are surely
among the finest designs of their time. How enduring the images
formed in his mind during the fruitful years of preoccupation with
the coast of Dymchurch can be appreciated by comparing Winter
Sea with Totes Meer, 5 another oil painting made in circumstances
entirely different and fifteen years after the earlier painting was
begun. The cold tones, the folded and undulating forms, the inform
ing spkit are to an extraordinary degree the same.
The bracing and elevating effect of the shore near Dymchurch in
helping him to solve, for a time, the problem of how a war artist
could adapt himself to peacetime themes became apparent when he
left Dorset. He paid a two- or three-week visit to Paris-his first-in
1922, spent the winter of 1924-5 at Cros de Cagnes, near Nice,
visited Florence and Siena, and, in 1925, settled at Iden near Rye.
The consequence of these various moves, more especially, perhaps,
that from the austere, linear coast of Dorset to the cozier region of
Rye, was that his work lost both in purposefuhiess and momentum.
I would be reluctant to dogmatize about this early visit to Paris, but
it is my belief that direct contacts with contemporary French art
confused him. The great international movements in the arts-
Fauvism, Cubism and the others -as they radiated outwards from
Paris were all-pervasive, affecting some artists without their being
aware of it and others who were fully aware. Paul Nash, it needs
scarcely be said, was always aware of the movements which played
upon his consciousness. For him, however, there was a difference
between taking Parisian modes of seeing as it were out of the air, and
being in immediate contact with Parisian art and artists. In the one
case he was simply drawing upon what had become a common heri
tage; in the other he was subjecting himself to a distracting influence.
The work he did on the Western Front and at Dymchurch owed
much that is most precious in it to the Cubist sentiment that strongly
1 The City Art Gallery, Manchester (Rudierston Coll.).
2 Coll. Major D. Fairfax Harvey, M.C. 3 Coll the Hon. Mrs, St. Leger.
4 Coll. Mrs. Charles Grey. * The Tate Gallery, London.
PAUL NASH 109
affected a whole generation of artists everywhere, but visits to
France, contacts with French artists, even visits to exhibitions of
contemporary French painting, were apt to agitate him to the dis
advantage of his work. The agitation was a subtle one and is not
easy to convey. It was as though, confronted with French painters
and their works, he felt the presence of a tradition which both drew
and repelled him. He was drawn to it as the tradition which was
central and in comparison with which all others were in varying
degree 'local', and as a tradition which fostered audacity and sparkle
and was as remote as possible from what he used to call 'the cold
middle-class Sunday lunch' character that summed up all that most
repelled him in the tradition of his own country. As a man and artist
deeply fastidious it seemed natural to belong to 'the best' tradition,
but he had seriously meditated inhibitions. Even when most tempted,
he was conscious of the depth of his English roots, of the nourish
ment he had drawn from the English water-colourists, the English
poets, from Rossetti and Borrow and Blake, and from the sights and
sounds of the English countryside. And he was, to judge from odd
remarks I heard him make, afraid that all this delicate and complex
English inheritance might be ironed out flat in the abstraction that
so predominantly formed the character of the Parisian tradition. He
used to say that he was Tor, but not with' the advocates of a wholly
abstract art, and he once precisely staked the limits of his own
participation in an art of this kind.
The hard cold stone, the rasping grass, the intricate architecture of trees
and waves [he wrote] I cannot translate altogether beyond their own
image, without suffering in spirit. My aim in symbolical representation
and abstraction, although governed by a purpose with a formal end in
view, seeks always to give life to a conception within the formal shell. 1
It was during the late 'twenties and the early 'thirties that he was
most sensitive to the attractions of the abstract-an attraction that
was heightened by the exhaustion of his purely visual response to
nature. This exhaustion is conspicuous in such naturalistic works as
French Farm* of 1926, Balcony, Cros de Cagnes* Cros de Cagnes* and
Mimosa Wood, 5 all three of 1927. He needed to rely more and more
1 From an article published in * Axis', January 193 5 . 2 Coll. Miss Winifred Felce.
3 Coll. Miss Winifred Felce. 4 The Italian Ministry of Education.
5 The National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
HO MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
upon a formal structure, and his most successful works were those in
which a clear-cut geometric design was elicited from or imposed
upon his subjects, works of which Chestnut Waters* of 1924-38, and
Pond in the Fields, 2 of 1927, are characteristic examples. Presently the
geometric design came first to dominate and eventually to con
stitute the picture. This development may be charted by comparing
Landscape at Iden* of 1928, Kinetic Feature* of 1931, and Poised
Objects, 5 of 1933. My own reading of his predicament during these
years is that his vision had grown languid: bored with nature and
uninventive in the field of pure abstraction, he was without com
pelling purpose, and it is my belief that a sentence come upon in a
book would stir his imagination and momentarily restore the pur
pose he lacked. To-day few epithets would be likely to be regarded
as more derogatory than 'literary', but it is necessary to say that Paul
Nash was, in the most intimate sense, a literary painter. He was
haunted by fragments of prose and poetry until, as he used to say,
they 'grew enormous' for him. In 1930, for instance, he began his
illustrations to Sir Thomas Browne's 'Urne Buriall' and 'The
Garden of Cyrus', 6 and reading the first he came upon a sentence
that became a treasured possession.
Before Plato could speak [it read] the soul had wings in Homer which
fell not but flew out of the body into the mansions of the dead.
This idea [he wrote many years afterwards] stirred my imagination
deeply. I could see the emblem of the soul- a little winged creature,
perhaps not unlike the ghost moth-perched upon the airy habitations
of the skies which in their turn sailed and swung from cloud to cloud
and then on into space once more. 7
This inspiring idea gave lightness, spaciousness and an aerial poetry
to the illustration in the book and the preliminary water-colour. 8
To the reading of the works of Thomas Browne Paul Nash owes
much more than a single compelling image. The potent strangeness
of Browne's personality, projected by his solemn, fantastic, luminous
prose, prose that is poetry in everything but form, impressed itself
deeply upon Paul Nash's nature, already well prepared to receive it.
1 The National Gallery of Canada (Masscy Coll), Ottawa.
2 Coll. Mrs. Raymond Asquith. 3 The Tate Gallery, London.
4 Private Coll. 5 Private Coll 6 Published in 1932.
7 'Aerial Flowers*, written in 1945 and published posthumously two years later.
8 Coll. Mr. Rex de C. Nan Kivell.
PAUL NASH III
The sonorous sentences echoed in his head; they charged it with a
teeming imagery. From his childhood, when he began to exaggerate
forms and sounds, he had been peculiarly susceptible to the charm of
strangeness; and who stranger than the man of whom Coleridge
wrote that 'so completely does he see everything in a light of his
own, reading nature neither by the sun, moon, nor candlelight, but
by the light of the faery glory round his head'?
During the 'thirties another incitement to his delight in strange
ness strengthened the spell laid upon him by the reading of Browne:
the dream imagery of Surrealism. To this imagery a nature such as
Paul Nash's was inevitably responsive. He had contacts with Max
Ernst, Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, and he took part, both as a
member of the committee and as an exhibitor, in the International
Surrealist Exhibition held in London in 193 6. The imagery permeated
his life as well as his art. Soon after he moved into a newly acquired
house, 3 Eldon Road, Hampstead, that same year, I went there to
luncheon and, being about to sit down in a certain chair, was warned
by Mrs. Nash that it was already occupied, as indeed it was, by a
stuffed hawk; the same bird, I think, as figures in his Landscape from
a Dream, 1 of 1938, a characteristic example of the artist's surrealist
painting. Thomas Browne and the surrealists evoked from the
imagination of Paul Nash a dream world of strange juxtapositions, of
cryptic symbols-the moons, tumuli, fossils, monoliths, fungi and
the like-all vaguely allusive to mystic numbers, occult correspon
dences belonging to the veiled childhood of the world, the world
devoid of organic life or else the habitation of primitive man.
There is the same attention to oddities, to the remoteness and minutiae
of vegetable objects, the same entireness of subject, [wrote Coleridge
of Browne] you have quincunxes in earth below, and quincunxes in the
water beneath the earth; quincunxes in deity, quincunxes in the mind of
man, quincunxes in the optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in
petals, in everything.
Add to all this the symbolism of surrealism and a perceptible
Parisian accent and you will have a fair verbal equivalent of the
principal work of Paul Nash during the period immediately pre
ceding the Second World War. Characteristic examples of this odd
crossing, so to say, of Thomas Browne and Andre Breton are
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
112 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Landscape of the Megaliths 1 (Plate 10), and Wood of the Nightmares'
Tails* of 1937, and Nocturnal Landscape? and Circle of the Mono
liths* of 1938. During the same years he made, too, a number of
paintings and water-colours of a slightly different character, in which
the emphasis is upon the surrealist element in an existing landscape
rather than, as in the first group, upon the incongruity of the objects
represented, such, for instance, as the large wooden lattice structure
in Nocturnal Landscape. Of these more realistic works Stone Sea, 5
of 1937, and Monster Field? of 1939, are outstanding examples; the
latter of them he regarded with as much satisfaction as any work of
his last decade.
Early in this essay I took issue with the Paul Nash legend that is
beginning to take shape. I must now challenge one of the attributes
that is on the way to being accepted as being his in a supreme degree
-imagination. To E. H. Ramsden he is an 'imaginative and inven
tive' artist who can take us 'from time into eternity, from the
sensible realities of the visible world into the supersensible of a world
that is above the visible'. 7 That such might be the effect of the impact
of certain of his works it would be impertinent to question; but I
would suggest that the effect would be due not to imagination or
invention but to some other quality. Painters are an exceptionally,
even a notoriously, observant class, for ever looking, constantly
noting down. The habit of observation springs from the threefold
necessity of stocking the mind with fruitful images, of finding
inspiring subjects and of discovering the laws of nature whereby the
selected images or subjects may be most convincingly represented.
With different artists the emphasis is upon different aspects of this
necessity: Blake, for instance, rarely took subjects from nature direct
but used observation as an imaginative incitement, and Constable,
little concerned with imagery, applied himself to a close study of the
laws ofnature with scientific detachment. Buttheinvolvement of man
kind in his environment is so intimate that the most imaginative artists
cannot dispense with a working knowledge of natural laws, or the
most realistic with imagery distilled from the contemplation of nature.
1 The Albright Gallery, Buffalo. 2 Coll Miss Elfric j a xharlc-Hughes.
3 The City Art Gallery, Manchester. 4 Coll. The Rev. F. R. Holmden.
5 Coll Mrs. Malcolm L. McBride. 6 The City Art Gallery, Durban.
7 'Paul Nash, Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations', p. 27.
PAUL NASH 113
It is generally assumed by those who have written about Paul Nash
that he belongs unequivocally to the imaginative tradition, the
tradition of Blake, and that he was detached to an unusual degree
from the scientific tradition of which Constable was the first and
most authoritative English advocate. 'A great imaginative artist: that
was established decades ago,' a critic wrote of Paul Nash, as though
it were a truism, a critic the most read of our day and upon an
important occasion. 1
It is not my purpose simply to deny so much as to qualify this
assumption. It is true that his own sympathies were ranged ardently
with the imaginative tradition: his intentions were imaginative. He
was not deeply concerned-and as he grew older his concern dimi-
nished-to represent aspects of nature; he was determined to create
an imagery out of his inner vision. That inner vision, at its happiest
moments, crystallized in pictures of a rich strangeness, glowing
with the heat of the sun or of a lunar pallor. How much the poorer
the art of our century would have been without Paul Nash's last
visionary landscapes! Were they to suffer destruction they would
be missed, of so special a kind is the beauty they manifest. Of how
few individual works can the same honestly be said! Works such as
Pillar and Moon, 2 of 1932-42, Landscape of the Vernal Equinox? of
1943 (Plate n), Nocturnal Floiver* of 1944, and The Eclipse of the
Sunflower f of 1945, most particularly the first, appear to me to be
works of great and original beauty. The fact that he was able only
occasionally to create works of this quality was due to the fact that
unlike his masters Rossetti and Blake Paul Nash imagined with
painful laboriousness. Neither general imaginative conceptions, nor
the precise imagery in which they might most vividly and precisely
be expressed, came to him without effort. To his dependence upon
the incitement of the haunting fragment from poetic literature I
have already alluded. The Landscape of the Vernal Equinox and the
other sunflower pictures of the 'forties, for instance, were inspired
by a literary image for long the subject of his meditation, first come
upon, I fancy, in 'Urne BurialF: 'the noble flower of the sun . . .
3L Eric Newton- Introduction to the catalogue of the Paul Nash Memorial
Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 1948.
2 The Tate Gallery, London. 3 Coll. H.M. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
4 Private coll., U.S.A. 5 Coll. Mr. R. C. Pritchard.
114 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
wherein in lozenge-figured boxes nature shuts up the seeds and
balsam that is about them', and intensified by Blake's memorable
lines:
Ah, Sunflower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun.
No less was his dependence upon close observation of nature for the
appropriate clothing of his imagery. The most conspicuous feature
of the only two of Paul Nash's many domiciles with which I was
familiar- the house at 3 Eldon Grove, Hampstead and the flat at
106 Banbury Road, Oxford, where he lived principally from 1939
until his death- was his collection of found objects, curiously shaped
stones and fragments of wood and bark, skeletons of leaves, shells
and the like. These became more and more necessary as stimulants
to his imagination and, more important, as providing a repertory of
forms with which to express his ideas. A camera was his constant
companion, 1 and in addition he would buy and borrow photographs.
I was the witness of a comical encounter between him and a fellow
painter with whom I stayed during 1944 in a beautiful house he
rented not far from Oxford. Here Paul Nash occasionally sallied
from his flat in the Banbury Road. The garden contained a shady
grove of trees in which statues were romantically disposed. The sight
of these lichen-covered foliage-shrouded figures -touchingly evoca
tive of the ancient world-stimulated in him a delightful agitation.
Just as a sportsman in the presence of game instinctively brings his
gun to bear, so did Paul Nash attempt to focus his camera upon stone
fawn and dryad. But every attempt was baffled by some adroit
movement of his vigilant host. 'After all,' he explained when Paul
Nash, unable to bear his frustration, had returned prematurely home,
'it is my grove: I don't really see, do you, why it should be the theme
of a whole series of Paul's pictures?' So complete at times was his
dependence upon photographs and found objects in the making of
his Imaginative' pictures that he was unable even to assimilate and
transmute them by the exercise of imagination, but instead intro
duced them direct on to the canvas or paper. Most of those who new
him were well aware of this procedure and there is written con
firmation of it from a friend who frequented his studio. 'Natural
1 A selection of his photographs was published as 'Fertile Image', and a retro
spective exhibition was organized by the Arts Council, 1951.
PAUL NASH 115
objects, e.g. shells, wood-fragments, fungi, leaves, etc., were taken
into the studio for closer examination and were there painted into
the composition from direct observation/ wrote Dr. Richard
Seddon in his 'Notes on the Technique of Paul Nash', giving two
examples of pictures, Bollard Phantom and Nest of Wild Stones, in
which this procedure had been followed. 1 There follows an observa
tion more significant still. 'When the objects were too big to be
taken home (e.g. the tree forms in Monster Field) they were (i)
sketched in situ in water-colour or (2) photographed/ What this
passage makes clear is the actual preference of the artist for painting
found objects or photographs of them into his imaginative com
positions. A picture which contains some elements painted from
direct observation and others that are imagined- whether ostensibly
realistic or imaginary makes no difference-is particularly liable to
enfeebling tensions and to a lack of unity of style. These are, I think,
the besetting weakness of the less successful of his later imaginative
pictures, but that is by the way. My purpose in considering this
aspect of his art was not to make this criticism but to attempt
to shed some light upon the larger question of the character of his
imagination.
Paul Nash, it seems to me, was not, in the fullest sense, an imagina
tive artist at all, in the sense, that is to say, of possessing an innate
image-making faculty, a mind from which imagery flowed naturally.
Instead it was a mind which became deeply versed in and deeply
devoted to the imaginative tradition. Its leaders were the objects of
his utmost veneration; its minor practitioners of his amused, acutely
discerning appreciation. To this tradition he bound his most urgent
preferences, emotional and intellectual. Paul Nash possessed an
indomitable will. In default of a natural image-making faculty he
evolved- when the inspiration he derived from the Western Front
had waned and left him without clear direction- the procedure
already noted. He developed his intense receptivity and systemati
cally exposed his mind to the poetry, the prose and the visual arts
that were most evocative of the earth's oldest memories, that echoed
most strangely in the corridors of the mind. Then when there arose a
responsive ferment in himself he set about to find objects which
would give lucid expression to his vague imaginings. His acute and
1 'Paul Nash, Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations', p. 43.
Il6 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
calculating intelligence, his poetic insight and his exquisite taste made
Paul Nash a wonderful agency for transmuting literary emotions
into the most sharply defined forms, for providing perfect visual
equivalents for Mansions of the Dead and Sunflowers weary of
Time. Sometimes the process had a mechanical quality evident in the
resulting pictures; at others that fine mind, steeled by that indomit
able determination, was rewarded by the power to make out of
borrowed elements something most lyrical and wholly his own.
The mind of an artist is a complex instrument, and in attempting to
describe the creative operations of the mind of Paul Nash I am aware
of having over simplified, but I believe that my description is a little
less remote from the unattainable truth than the declaration that he
was a great imaginative artist.
During his latter years his will had to contend not only with
imaginative dryness but with increasing ill health: for from 1932
until his death thirteen years later his life was made periodically
burdensome by asthma. The difficulties of these years were sensibly
increased by his involvement-first as an artist attached to the Royal
Air Force and later to the War Artists' Advisory Committee-in a
war that made no specific appeal to his imagination. To the eye it
offered nothing remotely comparable to the Western Front: his
man-made monsters flying out of the moon through cloud land
scapes represented no new departures but were the products of an
earlier phase of seeing. The idea of The Rose of Death, the name the
Spaniards gave to the parachute in their Civil War, haunted his
mind, but to no great purpose. It was not the white flower but
Totes Meer, the Dead Sea of crashed German bombers beneath the
icy light of the moon, that suggested that in other circumstances he
might have created out of the Second World War an art as memor
able as that inspired by the First. But the needful effort was beyond
his strength, for he had already begun, to die.
This essay was already in proof in 1955 before Mr. Anthony Bertram's
'Paul Nash: the Portrait of an Artist' appeared. It was, therefore, too late
for me to avail myself of the wealth of new information provided in
this patient biography. There is one matter, however, which by way of
conclusion I shall select for an allusion, since it qualifies an incomplete
statement of my own and a part of the Nash legend which, as I have
PAUL NASH
complained, tends to obscure both the real man and the nature of his
achievement,
On an earlier page I referred to Paul Nash's reading, at the beginning
of his career as an artist, as comprising, with Rossetti, Tennyson, Morris,
Keats, Whitman, Blake, Coleridge. The evidence for this was Nash's
unfinished autobiography. Mr. Bertram's researches into Paul Nash's
letters of the time, however, show that these great names were not
relevant until a later date. In 1909, when Nash was just short of twenty,
'there was great enthusiasm for "The Beloved Vagabond" by W. J.
Locke. "I think if I failed in this life (and I don't mean to)," Nash said, "I
should . . . take to the High Road. . . . Think of such a glorious existence
if you really loved the open air and knew about the woods and fields, as
I do a very little." 1 But of course vagabondage was not Nash's line at all,
though the influence was not to disappear at once; it was later to be more
respectably derived from Borrow.' 2
There was an enthusiasm for E. F. Benson's 'Angel of Pain' and a very
considerable one for the works of Algernon Blackwood. 'Nash first
particularly praised "John Silence", which certainly contains a good deal
of what was to be characteristic Nash imagery . . . haunted woods,
Druidic circles, mystic flying and again the curtain which threatens to lift
on the hidden presence/ 3 There was an even more intense enthusiasm for
'The Education of Uncle Paul' , . , 'the book has helped me and done me
good' 4 ... 'it is amazing,' comments Mr. Bertram, 'that this twaddle should
have fed an imagination so athletic as Nash's. But it certainly did: we
cannot fail to be struck by that accumulation of images from nature,
which is also almost a list of his themes. And the white wings were also to
play their part.' 5
In 1912 came an admiration for, it would seem, Arthur Machen and
'The Hill of Dreams'. In a letter of 5 March he quotes: 'Long, long ago,
a white merle flew out of Eden. Its song has been in the world ever since
but few there are who have seen the flash of its white wings thro' the
green gloom of the living wood, the sun splashed, rain drenched, mist
girt, storm beat wood of human life.' And he goes on: 'but today, as I
came thro' the wood, under an arch of tempest and led by lightnings, I
passed into a green sun splashed place. There, there I heard the singing of
a rapt song of joy! here and there I saw the flash of white wings.'
Paul Nash referred to the 'Hills of Dream', but there is no such book.
* "The Hill of Dreams" by Arthur Machen,' writes Mr. Bertram, 'seemed
a likely guess, but the passage is not to be found in it. And yet the book
corresponds so exactly at many points to Nash's imagery and imaginative
life at that time that he must certainly have read it, and confused the title
and source of his quotation. . . . There are many passages which are almost
1 9 March 1909. 2 Bertram, op. cit,, pp. 42-3. 3 Ibid., p. 43.
4 6 May 1911. 5 Op. cit., p. 44.
Il8 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
descriptions of certain pictures. The following extract is assembled from
three of them:
In the hedge of the lane there was a gate on which he used to lean
and look down south to where the hill surged up so suddenly, its
summit defined on summer evenings not only by the rounded ramparts
but by the ring of dense green foliage that marked the circle of oak
trees. . . . The image of it grew more intense as the symbol of certain
hints and suggestions. . . . The streaming fire of the great full moon
glowed through the bars of the weird oaks, and made a halo shine about
the hill.' 1
The book contains descriptions of trees, too, as 'forms that imitated
the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him . . . here
and there an oak stripped of its bark, white and haggard and leprous'. As
Mr. Bertram again comments, 'these are Nash's Monster Trees and the
subjects of many photographs in "Fertile Image".' 2
These passage I quote not primarily because they manifest the literary
nature of Nash's imaginative painting, concerned though Nash was for a
time, under the influence of fashionable aesthetic theory, to deny any
such literary inspiration. Still less do I quote them to his discredit. There
is no suggestion that Paul Nash took images that he used throughout his
painting life from books such as these. There was, after all, something
innate that responded to such literature and such romantic imagery, and
although such literature represented, in a sense, the most deplorable
elements in romantic writing, although it was imprecise and thoroughly
messy, full of what Mr. Eliot calls 'undisciplined squads of emotion*, it is
better to be moved even by stuff such as this than not to be moved at all
But it seems to me a remarkable and significant achievement for a man,
whose early literary tastes were of this character, to be able to discipline
and refine a thing so intimate as imagination into something both more
clear-edged and more deeply moving. The First World War did much;
it helped to rinse him of what Mr. Bertram calls 'the pseudo-poetic and
second-hand romanticism of his long adolescence'. 3 But above all there
was what I have already called his indomitable will.
I have said that the Paul Nash legend tends to obscure not only the real
man but also the nature of his achievement. For what Paul Nash achieved
was to make, out of an innately slender talent, a substantial body of
distinguished painting -just as, out of an innately poor talent for the
writing of English, he made the excellent prose or 'Outline' -and dis
tinguished not least in the quality of the imagination that in it he became
able so hauntingly to express and evoke. It is an achievement of assiduous
industry and discipline, and it is a considerable one.
1 Op. cit, pp. 49-50. 2 ibid^ p. 50. * Ibid., p. 90.
C. R.W. NEVINSON
18891946
A this series of studies has grown the question of which
painters to include and which not becomes more troubling.
Sometimes the answer is simple: to have ignored Sickert or
Augustus or Gwen John or Stanley Spencer, or, as an extraordinary
intellect at work among the arts, Wyndham Lewis, would be
palpably absurd. At other times the answer is not simple at all. There
are painters one aspect of whose work seems to me to have a chance
of proving durable, and the rest to have little. Again there are
painters whose qualities I am able to apprehend, yet with insufficient
comprehension to enable me to appraise them. Ivon Hitchens, for
example. I have been delighted by the glimpses he affords into the
enchanted depths of a vernal or an autumnal wood- glimpses I
remember gratefully like something vividly seen in childhood or a
few bars of a haunting, almost forgotten tune. But this is not enough:
my mind is insufficiently attuned to be able to appraise the elusive
irridescence of the art of Ivon Hitchens.
Other painters there are on whose work I shall have nothing to say
in these pages because the excellence that it uniformly maintains is
that of a tradition which is well understood and has been abundantly
written about, so that to-day critical explanation is superfluous. A
notable example of such an art is the portraiture and still-life of
Allan Gwynne-Jones, who, in sharp contrast to the highly idiosyn
cratic subjects of these studies, works with serene consistency in
the finest academic tradition. It is an uncommon achievement. The
present is a time when extremely individualistic art is almost the rule
among serious independent painters in England; on the other hand
the art that is popularly termed academic and is described by its
advocates as traditional-and sometimes as that which alone is 'sane'
or 'competent* or 'healthy' -is far indeed from any seriously main
tained academic tradition. In fact, the genuine academic painter, the
painter who is able to express himself fully within a great tradition
and with a complete understanding of its possibilities and limitations,
119
120 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
is a very rare bird indeed, and a fortunate one. But such a painter is
Gwynne-Jones. With no inclination to extend the frontiers of his
art or to pioneer in the forests, he has cultivated the gardens of his
choice with no less distinction than consistency. It is difficult to think
of a work more impeccable than his Peaches in a Basket, 1 of 1948.
C. R. W. Nevinson is a painter who belongs to the first of these
three categories, is a painter, that is to say, one part only of whose
work seems likely to endure. During a brief period of years he
painted pictures which demand a place in any account of English
painting during the present century, and for the rest of his life
paintings which, notwithstanding certain excellent qualities, seem
to me to have no title to such a place. It was Nevinson's misfortune
that his finest pictures had for their subject something that everyone
was under an almost irresistible compulsion to expel from their
memory: the First World War's Western Front. The memory of
mile upon mile of earth dissolved into deep slime or else burnt and
torn, the scene of death on a scale without precedent, is a memory
which, even for those who never saw it and even after a second and
more hideous world war, cannot be recalled without a painful
effort. It was a further misfortune that during the ensuing years his
work acquired a repute that was widespread rather than firmly
established. The neglect that often follows an artist's death has been
with him unusually severe. Few names, among those well known in
Georgian times, occur less frequently in conversation, I should say,
among painters and writers about painting. If now and then the
name of Nevinson is mentioned by some young student of art
history, it is likely that it is not the painter but the solitary English
Futurist, the friend of Boccioni and Soffici, the man who beat the
drum at the Dore Galleries while Marinetti declaimed his verse,
who has aroused his passing interest.
O O vS"
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was born on 13 August
1889, the only child of Henry Woodd Nevinson and his first wife
Margaret Wynne, daughter of the Rev. Timothy Jones, a Welsh-
speaking Welshman and classical scholar, in John Street, Hampstead,
since renamed Keats Grove. The Nevinsons occupied a house, now
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 121
demolished, which stood opposite to the elegant white villa where
Keats lived.
Henry Nevinson was a celebrated war correspondent, and his wife
made a career for herself in education and politics, playing an active
part in the campaign for Women's Suffrage and the reform of the
Poor Law. The home they made was a disturbing place for a boy to
grow up in. The father was inclined to be a radical both in his think
ing and his feeling, who yet delighted in army life. The mother, a
shingled, sandalled progressive in home affairs, was also an ardent
jingo, and when Mafeking was relieved she and her small son, he
relates in his memoirs, 'draped in red, white and blue . . . wandered
from Ludgate Circus to Piccadilly ringing a dinner bell'. 1
This conflict in both his remarkable parents, arising from their
emotional attachment to the established order of things, represented
by the Empire, the Army, the older public schools and universities,
and their attachments, equally emotional, to progressive causes of
many kinds was inherited, in an acute form, by their son, who was
at once ardently institutional in his loyalties, yet something of a
revolutionary too, but the conflict in father and son took a precisely
opposite course. The father, who began with traditional class
sympathies and wished his son to follow him to Shrewsbury and
Oxford, ended as a passionate socialist. I remember a discussion tak
ing place at my own parents' house during the General Strike of 1926,
on its rights and wrongs, but nothing of what was said except
Henry Nevinson's passionate exclamation: 'The People: right or
wrong!' The son, after being among the very first among English
painters to be fully conscious of the revolutionary ferment on the
Continent in the years just prior to the First World War, and taking
a leading and energetic part both in proclaiming Futurist and Cubist
ideas and in making them a part of his way of seeing, was soon
declaring that 'The immediate need of the art of today is a C6zamie,
a reactionary, to lead art back to the academic traditions of the old
Masters, and save contemporary art from abstraction, as C&anne
saved Impressionism from "effects".' 2 Yet just as his father con
tinued to delight in army life so did the son preserve until the end
something of his early challenging attitude towards art and life.
1 'Paint and Prejudice', 1937, P- 7-
2 'The Studio', December 1919.
122 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
There was another way in which the personalities of his parents
affected him, and wholly adversely. Both in their different ways
were champions of under-dogs, turbulent pioneers, indifferent if
not contemptuous of public opinion. Unpopular causes were their
vocation, and their challenging character and progressive temper
were as defiantly manifest in the home as they were outside. The
walls, distempered instead of papered, were ornamented with
reproductions of Italian primitives and Pre-Raphaelites, and with
English water-colours. These departures from the prevailing taste of
the middle-class neighbourhood, in which Nottingham lace curtains
and a cosy profusion of knick-knacks were the rule, deepened the
suspicions engendered by Mrs. Nevinson's shingled hair, and, as a
consequence, her son relates, he was booed in the streets. This and
other manifestations of hostility implanted in him an enduring sense
of being an innocent victim of the world's ill-will, indeed of its
persecution. At the height of his success as a painter, with his massive
figure and booming voice Nevinson presented to the world an
imposing, even a formidable aspect; yet those who knew him were,
I fancy, uncomfortably aware that only just beneath the surface
worked an inordinate horror of ill-will and a readiness to see it even
where it was not. This vulnerability was made the more acute by
unhappy experiences at school. At the age of seven he was 'publicly
flogged . . . for giving away some stamps which I believed to be my
own'. 1
After a happy interlude at University College School he was sent,
in 1904, to Uppingham, where persistent ill-treatment left him, he
relates, 'septic in mind and body' and led to a serious operation and
his removal from school. It was after his illness, in the course of a
tour in Spain, North Africa and north Italy, that he began to draw.
On his return he went back to Uppingham for one term, but his
health was still so bad that it was plain that there was no longer any
question of his going to Balliol as his father wished. During his tour
he had decided to become a painter. When he left Uppingham he
entered, in 1907, the St. John's Wood School of Art.
It was the bicycling tours on which his mother used to take
him that developed the visual side of his nature. They visited
churches and colonies of artists.
1 Op. cit, p. 3.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 123
In the art colonies at Pont Aven, Concarneau, Quimper, St. Pol,
Caudebec, and St. Michel we always associated with the painters. The
name of Monet had been familiar to me for some time. As my mother
had been in Paris from about 1870 she was particularly versed in the
Impressionist school; and I had already devoured, by the age of fifteen,
the books of Camille Mauclair on Renoir, Manet, Degas, Sisley, and
Pissarro, and had heard of Gauguin and Cezanne. I had even heard of
the 'mad' paintings of Van Gogh some five years before their 'discovery'
by Roger Fry and the dealers.' 1
By the time he left Uppingham he had not only a lively interest in
painting. He had a point of view.
I was [he relates] a modernist. The plethora of artistic training and my
revolt against public-school traditions made me bored with old masters;
in Venice an international exhibition of contemporary art had interested
me more than anything I had ever seen. I really was excited about it,
although it is significant that now I can recall no single picture I saw
there except those which introduced me to the technique of a Neo-
Impressionist, Signac. 2
As he is writing of the time before he left Uppingham, it is unclear to
what 'the plethora of artistic training' refers. The only training he
appears to have had was occasional instruction from John Fulleylove,
the architectural draughtsman and water-colour painter. The
description of his discovery, while a student at St. John's Wood, of
the drawings of Augustus John and Orpen, in a publication entitled
'The Slade', and of how they 'completely upset my applecart' and
precipitated 'a period of doubt', suggests that his memory was at
fault, and that the continental masters whom he named had re
mained little more than names, or that he came upon them a little
later on. Had he been, in fact, as familiar with them as he claimed,
his 'apple cart' would hardly have been upset by reproductions of
drawings so closely formed upon the old masters as those of John and
Orpen. Nor would his 'period of doubt' have been ended as it was
when Sargent 'the god of St. John's Wood' stated that John was 'the
greatest draughtsman since the Renaissance'. To a student 'familiar
with all French art/ as he claimed to be, 3 neither the drawings of
John and Orpen nor the opinions of Sargent, worthy of note though
they be, would offer so shaking an experience as to lead to the over
throw of all his values.
1 Op. cit., p. 9. 2 Ibid., p. 13- 3 Ibid., p. 19,
124 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Nevinson was, I fancy, more accurate when he insisted on the
academic aspect of the school and recalled his laborious days in the
'antique', chalk stump and pointed indiarubber in hand, his drawing
from the model at night, his concentration upon head and figure
painting and the interest in the old masters which it brought, more
especially in Diirer, Holbein and Antonello da Messina. The impact
of the drawings of John and Orpen showed him that the Slade
tradition had an energy and an expressive power unknown to his
teachers. Accordingly in 1909 he left St. John's Wood for the Slade,
where he remained for three years.
Nevinson was fortunate in going to the Slade during one of its
liveliest periods. Stanley Spencer, Gertler, Currie and Wadsworth
were among his fellow-students, and these, with Allinson, Glaus,
Ihlee, Lightfoot and Nevinson himself, formed a gang which wore
uniforms of black jersey, black hat and scarlet muffler and which
roved the streets of Soho in search of trouble. They did not, accord
ing to various accounts, have far to look. While he was at the Slade
Nevinson studied sculpture with Havard Thomas. Like a number of
other beginners of promise he was given his first opportunity of
showing his work, in 1910, by the Friday Club, and some of it
earned the favourable notice of serious critics. Two of his urban
landscapes, paintings in the impressionist tradition, were singled out
for their exceptional promise by 'The Sunday Times'. Sickert had
spoken some words of encouragement to him and Oilman and Gore
had welcomed him into the Camden Town circle. For the first time
Nevinson felt the ground firm beneath his feet. He was happy in the
consciousness of making progress. His feeling of unhappy singularity
was waning. Then Tonks told Nevinson as he had told Matthew
Smith a few years earlier that he was without talent and unqualified
to be a painter. For students with whom he was in sympathy and
numerous others Tonks was a great teacher of drawing -one of the
few great teachers of the time -but there were always certain
students for whom he formed inveterate dislikes and whom he
harried without mercy. In certain cases-and Nevinson was one-he
pursued his victims long after they had left the Slade, So cogently
did Tonks frame his advice to Nevinson to abandon painting that it
was temporarily accepted: the Slade student became for a short time
a Fleet Street apprentice. Nevinson enjoyed interviewing Little Tich
C. R. W. NEVINSON 125
and Marie Lloyd, but the episode was baleful in its effects. The
hostility of Tonks revived and intensified his crushing sense of the
world's ill-will, a sense which from that time onwards was ever on
the alert. Moreover his brief term in Fleet Street taught him at once
too much and too little about the Press. From it he learnt its extra
ordinary power and how to harness it, but little of its attendant
dangers. Even after he left Fleet Street he knew how to secure the
widest publicity for his work and for his opinions. This doubtless
contributed to his material success, but it also provoked the jealousy
of other artists, vulgarized his reputation and involved him from
time to time in situations which would have been distressing to most
men but which were particularly injurious to the constitution of a
man of his temperament. In spite of its undesirable consequences
Press publicity appealed to Nevinson. He took a frank pleasure in
being a celebrity and a popular oracle on any topic of the moment,
and his Fleet Street experience suggested to him that this pleasure
was not at all uncommon, especially among eminent persons who
insisted that they were superior to such vulgar satisfactions. Such
hypocrisy was repellent to his own candid nature. Later on he came
to attach a moral sanction to his belief in publicity.
My Futurist training [he wrote] had convinced me that a man who
lives by the public should make his appeal to that public and meet
that public, and that all hole-and-corner cliques, and scratch-a-back
societies are disastrous to the artist and his output. A coterie becomes
a tyrant, falsifying a man's standards. Consciously or unconsciously
he trims. When he is dealing with a wider and perhaps a more un~
discriminating public there is always the chance that his point of view
may appeal to an unknown individual. In the past it has been the
expert, the critic, and the "artistic" who have been wrong, and stray
members of the public always right. 1
A visit to Paris in 1911 -at perhaps the most creative moment in
the history of modern painting -restored his sense of vocation. In
the mornings he worked at Julian's in the rue du Dragon and at the
Moutmartre Julian's in the evening, and occasionally at the Circle
Russe where Matisse taught. After a return to London he was back
in 1912 for a further and still more fruitful stay in Paris, for it was
then that he received the impact of Cubism. *I felt the power of this
1 Op. cit, pp. 91-2.
126 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
first phase of Cubism,' he wrote, 'and there was a desire in me to
reach that dignity which can be conveyed pictorially by the abstract
rather than the particular/ 1
Nevinson gives a fairly extensive account of his visits to Paris, but
because of the small number of his early works which appear to
survive, and the inaccuracy of his writing, it is difficult to assess with
any degree of precision the nature of the impact upon his ideas or
his practice. The general direction of his development was away
from the tradition of Renoir, Monet and other Impressionists to
wards the newer tradition which Picasso, Matisse and a crowd of
others were forging out of the legacy of Cezanne, and he was con
scious of the attraction of Gauguin and of Van Gogh, whose example,
he has told us, encouraged him to use outline to simplify his form
and to emphasize his planes, and of abstract art, more especially of
that of Kandinsky. But these were forces that were animating a
whole generation of painters. Even the influence of Cubism, which
he acknowledged so explicity and which at first glance seemed so
completely to dominate the work of his most creative period, seems
ambiguous under scrutiny.
The account he gives of the artist's Paris, though lively, throws
no new light upon the personalities or ideas which were contributing
to the formation of what was nothing less than the matrix of a new
art. He was gregarious, voluble, alive to what was going on around
him; he was acquainted with a number of leading artists; he even
shared a studio with Modigliani The assurance of his writing is,
however, hardly justified.
The works of Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck were by now well
known to me if to no one else. The Fauviste school, through the in
fluence of Gauguin, was reacting against the prettiness and technical
accomplishment of French art. They were trying to introduce into their
work a harsher or wilder note, a more intense expression, although of
course, Picasso was still swayed by Toulouse-Lautrec and was only just
leaving his blue period. , . . 2
The year was 1912: Fauvism, far from being, as he implies, a new
movement, had fulfilled its aims some four years earlier, and the
former Fauves were currently engaged in adventures of a quite
different kind; Picasso had left his blue period some eight years
*Op. cit,p. 43- 2 Ibid., p. 42.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 127
earlier, and he could not have been said to be 'swayed by Toulouse-
Lautrec' since the beginning of the century.
Wherever he went every manifestation of life presented itself to
Nevinson as an object of fascination. To have his creative interest
aroused, he had but to look. Whether it was the gaunt silhouette of
a factory at night, brightly dressed girls in punts on the Thames, 'any
London street' (the title of one of his paintings) -it scarcely mattered.
The work of most painters is empty because they do not love life
enough, and because a great master, on account of the burning
patience of his dedication, needing a natural object to paint which
was immobile and relatively unchanging, painted apples, these lesser
men-however rapid their execution- have made still-life a pretext
for ignoring life. (I can just hear their supercilious question, 'but
isn't an apple as much "life" as anything else?'.) Nevinson's eye was
too voracious, especially of the dramatic, the exciting, the sinister
and the pretty, and its voracity tended to carry the hand with it too
fast, to demean it into a mere recorder. The discipline of Cubism
enabled him to impose a style upon the variegated prey of his
voracious eye. For many artists who adopted Cubism it was an
experiment, another set of principles; for Nevinson, at the most
creative period of his life, Cubism was the tiling needful to give to
his work the simplicity and the dignity he desired to reach. Yet
his debt to Cubism being made plain it is necessary also to draw a
sharp distinction between the Cubism of the pioneers of Cubism,
Picasso and Braque during the years 1910, 1911 and 1912, and the
later Cubism of Nevinson. 'Cubism/ declared Picasso, 'is an art
dealing primarily with forms.' 1 This is true both of the earlier phase
of dissection and reassembly of the forms of nature generally known
as Analytical, and of the later, more inventive, remoter from a point
of departure in nature, generally known as Synthetic. For Picasso and
Braque, although Cubism was primarily an art of form, it was not
a wholly abstract art, it was also an art of representation.
Always there were vestiges of 'nature', [as Alfred H. Barr observed]
whether a landscape, a figure or a still-life. And these vestiges however
slight remained essentially important, for they revealed the point of
departure, the degree of transformation undergone by the original
image; they supplied the tense cord which anchored the picture to
1 'Picasso Speaks*. 'The Arts' (New York), May 1923.
128 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
common reality yet gave the measure of its daring distance. In this sense
a cubist picture was not only a design but a precisely controlled and far
fetched metaphor. 1
To Nevinson the subtle analysis of natural forms of Picasso and
Braque would have been incomprehensible; with the principles of
Cubism or any other contemporary movement he was unconcerned.
He was an artist of superb adaptability and resource, who saw in
contemporary movements expedients adapted to the representation
of certain subjects. 'I maintain,' he asserted, "that it is impossible to
use the same means to express the flesh of a woman and the ferro
concrete of a sky-scraper. . . / 2 But Picasso, for whom within a
certain span of years Cubism was not an expedient but a natural
evolving language, did precisely that, painting Factory at Horta, in
I909 3 and Girl With a Mandolin* the following year, in a style in all
essentials the same.
During the three years before the First World War Nevinson kept
in close touch with Paris, but in 1913 London became the principal
theatre of his activities. These were years when the art world of
London, like that of Paris, was deeply but optimistically agitated by
the new movements that were continually germinating, clashing,
intermingling, changing direction; continually affected, too, by the
ebb and flow of ideas from Paris, at that time a white-hot crucible
of ideas eagerly discussed, bitterly fought over, and wafted promptly
away to the ends of the artistic earth to bring inspiration or resent
ment, but at all events passionate interest, wherever they lodged.
Although London was not as significant a centre as Paris, a city
where those concerned with the visual arts are more visual and less
literary than they are apt to be in London, more audacious and more
extreme in their thinking, and, above all, the place where the
revolutionary masters congregated, nevertheless London on. the eve
of the First World War was a centre where a quite unusual number
of men of talent were active in painting and sculpture, in thought
about the arts, in writing and discussion, and where, in consequence,
foreigners of talent such as Gaudier-Brzeska came to live and many
1 'Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art', 1946, p. 74.
2 'Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings, Etchings, Lithographs and Woodcuts'
by C. R. W. Nevinson at the Bourgeois Galleries, New York, 10 November to
4 December 1920.
3 Museum of Western Art, Moscow. 4 Coll Mr. Roland Penrose.
C. R. W. NEVINSON I2p
more to propagate their ideas and to see what was in progress. The
bracing and optimistic character of the climate brought forth and
was in turn heightened by a series of exhibitions of the works of
continental painters and sculptors, by the inauguration of Frank
Rutter's Allied Artists' Association-a London version of the Paris
'Independents' -and by the formation of more or less revolutionary
exhibiting groups of many kinds.
Nevinson's adventurous predilections and his exceptional know
ledge of movers and shakers of the Parisian art vortex led him quickly
into its London equivalent. He contributed in 1910, 1913 and 1914,
to the Allied Artists' exhibitions at the Albert Hall, which, vast and
inchoate though they were, generated much heat and led to fruitful
associations, and he was included in the Post-Impressionist and
Futurist Exhibition brought together by Frank Rutter at the Dore
Galleries in the autumn of 1913, a lively survey of revolutionary
painting from Pissarro, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin to the
generation of Nevinson himself. Among the fine paintings contri
buted by Nevinson was The Departure of the Train de Luxe, 1 which
was a frankly Futurist work, and owed much to Severini, whose
paintings, more especially The 'pan-pan Dancers at the Monico in the
Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters at the Sackville
Gallery in March 1912, had provoked wide interest. This picture
stirred Nevinson to an extraordinary enthusiasm. When he met
Severini at lunch with Roger Fry and Mr. Clive Bell he was
fascinated not only by the Futurist painter himself, but by the
Futurist gospel in general and more particularly by its insistence
upon dynamism and the beauty of modem life, especially the teem
ing life of great cities, of machinery.
We choose to concentrate our attention [wrote Severini] on things in
motion because our modern sensibility is particularly qualified to grasp
the idea of speed. Heavy, powerful motor-cars rushing through the
crowded streets of our cities, dancers reflected in the fairy ambience of
light and colour, aeroplanes flying above the heads of an excited
throng. . . . These sources of emotion satisfy our sense of the lyric and
dramatic universe, better than do two pears and an apple. 2
1 1913. Whereabouts unknown.
2 The artist's introduction to the catalogue of Gino Severini's Exhibition,
Marlborough Gallery, which had no connexion with the existing gallery of the
same name, April 1913.
130 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
The two painters became close friends, and Nevinson accompanied
Severini back to Paris, where he was introduced into Futurist and
Cubist circles. When Marinetti, the founder and leader of Futurism,
told Severini that he had it in mind to revisit England, Nevinson
asked Severini to persuade him to carry out his intention, 1 and when
he arrived in the autumn of 1913 Nevinson joined with Wyndham
Lewis in organizing the dinner of welcome at the Florence
Restaurant.
This dinner at which about sixty painters, writers and others were
assembled was an event of which Nevinson has given a lively
description:
It was an extraordinary affair. Marinetti recited a poem about the siege
of Adrianople, with various kinds of onomatopoeic noises and crashes
in free verse, while all the time a band downstairs played, 'You made
me love you. I didn't want to do it. 5 It was grand if incoherent. I made
a short speech in French and Lewis followed, then jealousy "began to
show its head. Marinetti knew of me through Severini and he under
stood my French better, so he paid more attention to me. He did not
know, poor fellow, that he was wrecking a friendship that promised
well. His French was good, having nothing of the Italian accent or
phraseology I associated with Severini or Boccioni. It certainly was a
funny meal. Most people had come to laugh, but there were few who
were not overwhelmed by the dynamic personality and declamatory
gifts of the Italian propagandist; while still the band downstairs tinkled
on: 'You made me love you.' It seemed incapable of playing anything
else. This was my first public appearance before the Press. It was also
my first speech of any kind. The men who covered it for the papers
knew little of what was said, but from a sensational point of view they
got all they wanted, and for a time my name seemed always to be in
print. 2
Some months after the long remembered dinner in his honour
Marinetti paid a further visit to London and with Nevinson issued
'Vital English Art. Futurist Manifesto'. This first appeared in 'The
Observer' on 7 June 1914, but was subsequently printed in other
newspapers, and Nevinson used to shower copies of it from the
galleries of theatres. In order to distinguish it from earlier pro
nouncements of the kind issued by the Futurist movement since the
original Futurist Manifesto, which was published in 'Figaro' on
20 February 1909, this has become known as the English Futurist
1 Nevinson, op. cit, pp. 56, 57.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 13!
Manifesto. Like its predecessors, it was a violent denunciation of the
worship of tradition, of 'the pretty-pretty ... the sickly revivals of
mediaevalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial
battlements, the Maypole Morris dances, Aestheticism, Oscar Wilde,
the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-primitives and Paris'; against 'the sham
revolutionaries of the New English Art Club'; against 'the old
grotesque idea of genius -drunken, filthy, ragged, outcast ... the
Post-Rossettis with long hair under the sombrero, and other passeist
filth/ ('Passeist filth' became, for a time, a stock term of denigration
applicable to any work of the past or to any work of the present in
which the influence of the past was too obviously manifest, of which
the speaker wished to register disapproval.) It was not, however,
its denunciations of passeist filth- lively copy though this furnished
for the Press -as its commendation of England's 'advance guard of
artists' that provoked the uproar that followed its publication. 'So
we call upon the English public', runs the final paragraph of the
manifesto, 'to support, defend and glorify the genius of the great
Futurist painters or pioneers and advance-forces of vital English Art
-Atkinson, Bomberg, Epstein, Etchells, Hamilton, Nevinson,
Roberts, Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis.'
In appending his name to the manifesto Nevinson committed an
egregious error-an error that had unhappy consequences for him
self. The manifesto, as the pronundamento of a foreigner, would
probably have been treated as a spirited display of fireworks, but,
appearing over the signature of an Englishman as well, several of its
targets seemed ineptly chosen. The Prc-Raphaelites, for instance,
had never been less influential than they were in 1914, and people
wondered which garden city was protected by artificial battlements,
and were amused that anyone should see a menace to progress in the
activities of the scattered tiny groups of intellectuals who were
attempting, a little forlornly, to revive ancient folk dances. People
wondered, too, why a statement which opened with the words, 'I am
an Italian Futurist poet,' and ended with a call 'to support, defend
and glorify the genius' of, among a small number of artists, Nevinson
himself should have been signed by Nevinson at all. More informed
readers were also aware that he was eager to have his own works
accepted by the 'sham revolutionaries' of the New English Art Club.
Of his election to its membership in 1929 he wrote, 'I think no honour
132 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
gratified me more.' 1 He disclosed in the same paragraph that he had
allowed himself to be put up for membership 'fifteen years before',
that is to say, in 1914, the year of the manifesto's issue. These errors
of judgment were small matters and would have been quickly for
gotten, but he was guilty of a greater. Nevinson was a bold, out
spoken man, ever ready, in the best traditions of his family, to speak
out in support of what he considered to be right. He was a friend of
Marinetti and Severini, and a painter of precocious talent. All this
gave him a deserved prominence among 'the pioneers and advance
forces of Vital English Art'. But it did not make him their leader,
and it did not make him an art philosopher. By signing a manifesto
jointly with Marinetti he made what many interpreted as an assertion
of leadership, an assertion the more explicit on account of the
description of the eight other artists named in the manifesto as
Futurists. If Nevinson, an avowed Futurist, had allowed no allusion
to these others, the manifesto might have been regarded as an
exclusively Futurist affair: as things were, it was easy for these eight
to see an attempt to subordinate them to his leadership. Above all, it
looked like a direct challenge to a man who was an art philosopher
of extraordinary power and originality, and who was the directing
power in the Rebel Art Centre, which Nevinson, with his pro
pensity for associating himself with institutions, thoughtlessly gave
as the address beneath his signature. Moreover Lewis would not
have forgotten that Nevinson owed something to his early encourage
ment, and more to his ideas.
The reply to this real or fancied challenge was not long in coming,
A week later 'The Observer' published the following reply, which,
considering Lewis's provocation and his formidable powers as a
pamphleteer, is a document less savage than severe, and wounding
chiefly by the omission of any reference to the manifesto's English
signatory:
DEAR SIR, - To read or hear the praises of oneself or one's friends is
always pleasant. There are forms of praise, however, which are so com
pounded with innuendo as to be most embarrassing. One may find
oneself, for instance, so praised as to make it appear that one's opinions
coincide with those of the person who praises, in which case one finds
oneself in the difficult position of disclaiming the laudation or of even
slightly resenting it.
1 Op. cit, p. 1 86.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 133
There are certain artists in England who do not belong to the Royal
Academy nor to any of the passeist groups, and who do not on that
account agree with the futurism of Signor Marinetti. An assumption of
such agreement either by Signor Marinetti or by his followers is an
impertinence.
We, the undersigned, whose ideals were mentioned or implied, or
who might, by the opinions of others, be implicated, beg to dissociate
ourselves from the 'Futurist' manifesto which appeared in the pages of
THE OBSERVER of Sunday, June 7.
Signed:
RICHARD ALDINGTON. LAWRENCE ATKINSON. DAVID BOMBERG.
GAUDIER BRZESKA. FREDERICK ETCHEIZS. CUTHBERT HAMILTON.
EZRA POUND. W. ROBERTS. EDWARD WADSWORTH. WYNDHAM
LEWIS.
P.S. The Direction of the Rebel Art Centre wishes to state that the
use of their address by Signor Marinetti and Mr. Nevinson was un
authorized.
REBEL ART CENTRE,
38, GREAT ORMOND-STREET, W.C., June 8.
'The Observer' printed, the following Sunday, a plaintive and not
very convincing rejoinder, and the honours rested with Lewis.
On Friday 12 June, only two days before the publication of the
Vorticists' disclaimer and ignorant that it was impending, Nevinson
and Marinetti organized a Futurist demonstration at the Dore
Galleries. Nevinson spoke first, reading his speech, which appears
to have been an extended version of the English Futurist Manifesto;
Marinetti followed. Wyndham Lewis has described his 'counter
putsch'.
I assembled [he wrote] a determined band of miscellaneous anti-
futurists. Mr. Epstein was there; Gaudier Brzeska, T. E. Hulme,
Edward Wadsworth. . . . There were about ten of us. After a hearty
meal we shuffled bellicosely round to the Dore Gallery.
Marinetti had entrenched himself upon a high lecture platform, and
he put down a tremendous barrage in French as we entered. Gaudier
went into action at once. He was very good at the parlez-vous, in fact
he was a Frenchman. He was sniping him without intermission, stand
ing up in his place in the audience all the while. The remainder of our
party maintained a confused uproar,
Tne Italian intruder was worsted But it was a matter for astonish
ment what he could do with his unaided voice. He certainly made an
extraordinary amount of noise My equanimity when first subjected
134 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to
my marinettian preparation-it seemed *all quiet' to me in fact, by
comparison. 1
Noise, indeed, was Marinetti's element, the necessary accompani
ment to all his actions. There was an occasion when he again
lectured at the Dore Galleries and declaimed his poems. One of these
required to be accompanied by the noise of bombardment, to be
'packed to the muzzle with what he called "la rage balkanique' Y so
Nevinson 'concealed himself somewhere in the hall, and at a signal
from Marinetti belaboured a gigantic drum'. 2 Nevinson himself
has described Marinetti's supreme attempt to break the eardrums
of Londoners.
It says a great deal for Marinetti [he wrote] that he was able to induce
Oswald Stoll to put him on at the Coliseum. Nobody else could have
done it. Naturally I went to see the first performance, and I must say
it was one of the funniest shows ever put on in London, provided, of
course, that one looked at things from the right angle. Marinetti
swaggered on to that vast stage looking about the size of a house fly,
and bowed. As he spoke no English, there was no time wasted in
explanations or in the preparation of his audience. Had they spoken
Italian, I do believe Marinetti could have magnetized them as he did
everybody else. There was nothing for it however, but to call upon his
ten noise tuners to play, so they turned handles like those of a hurdy-
gurdy. It must have sounded magnificent to him, for he beamed; but
a little way back in the auditorium all one could hear was the faintest
of buzzes. At first the audience did not understand that this was the
performance offered them in return for their hard-earned cash, but
when they did there was one vast, deep, and long-sustained, 'Boo!'
When I went round to the back I found Marinetti in the best of
spirits, dismissing the unanimous condemnation of the audience and
calmly announcing to the Press, 'C'etait un cabal/ 3
I have insisted upon some of the boisterous manifestations of the
excitement and extremism with which the art world, in London
as elsewhere, was so highly charged, because of its effect upon
1 'Blasting and Bombardiering', by Wyndham Lewis, 1937, pp. 36, 37.
2 Ibid., p. 36. Lewis described this occasion as being before Nevinson 'declared
war on us, especially on me*. According to Nevinson (Taint and Prejudice', p. 61)
it was later, on a subsequent visit of Marinctti's. I think Nevinson's account is more
likely to be correct, for Marinetti made his first appearance supported by Nevinson,
only five days after the promulgation of the English Futurist Manifesto.
8 Op. cit., pp. 61, 62.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 135
the art of Nevinson, both immediately and later on by way of
reaction.
The last and least ephemeral of these manifestations was the
publication, thirteen days after that of the English Futurist Mani
festo, and only six after the Vorticist's rejoinder, of 'Blast', No. I,
which contained the last of the major manifestos, that of the Great
London Vortex. It appeared, too, less than two months before war
was declared. 'The months immediately preceding the declaration
of war were full of sound and fury,' Lewis wrote, 'and ... all the
artists and men of letters had gone into action before the bank-
clerks were clapped into khaki and dispatched to the land of Flanders
Poppies to do their bit. Life was one big bloodless brawl, prior to the
Great Bloodletting.' 1 Many artists and writers were attuned to war
by the time it came, and none more closely than Nevinson.
When the war came the urge which drew Nevinson as strongly
as it drew his father towards centres where exciting events were in
progress, promptly involved him. His health, never good-and
which deteriorated progressively-put enlistment in the armed forces
out of the question. 'Still, I was pursued by the urge to do something,
to be "in" the war,' 2 he wrote, and it was not long before his urge
was satisfied. Hearing from his father of the shortage of ambulance
drivers in France, he joined the Red Cross, and he was promptly
sent with his unit to Dunkirk. The French medical service, in that
area at least, had broken down. A number of French wounded,
roughly bandaged, had been packed into cattle-trucks. By the time
they had lain there neglected for three weeks, only half of them were
alive, and the train being required for purposes more important than
taking wounded men to hospital, its contents were dumped into a
shed. 'There/ wrote Nevinson, 'we found them. They lay on dirty
straw, foul with old bandages and filth, those gaunt, bearded men,
some white and still with only a faint movement of the chests to
distinguish them from the dead by their side.' 3 This scene, suddenly
come upon in darkness, became an unforgettable memory, and the
subject of one of the three or four paintings to which, if the reputa
tion of Nevinson survives, it will owe its survival, La Patrie* (Plate
12). But for the moment there was no time for painting, for making
1 'Blasting and Bombardiering*, p. 39. 2 Op. cit, p. 71.
" Ibid., pp. 71-2. * Coll. Mr. L. J. Cadbury.
3
136 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
more than an occasional hasty sketch. There were the wounded-
Nevinson served not only as driver but as nurse, stretcher-bearer and
interpreter as well-in ever increasing numbers; there were troubles
between his unit and the French authorities for attending wounded
Germans, for amputating limbs without official permission and
thereby entitling those who thus suffered to a higher rate of disable
ment pension. At Dunkirk he saw the body of a child killed in an
air-raid: a memory also retained for translation into a picture. In
the meanwhile the French medical service had greatly improved,
and Nevinson's health suffered from the strain and the exposure
which his duties involved, and he was sent home. After an interlude
in London he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving as an
orderly at the Third General Hospital in London. In January 1916
he was invalided out of the Army with rheumatic fever.
Such, in brief, was the modest extent of Nevinson's military
career, but the nature of his earlier duties as an ambulance driver
with the Red Cross in France, involving constant journeys by road,
gave him opportunities for studying long sections of the fighting
line and the burnt and shattered country, as well as first-aid posts and
base hospitals, that were denied to most combatants, for whom the
war was often a monotonous alternation of trench and rest camp.
It was not Nevinson's opportunities for observing the Western
Front, which though excellent were far from unique, but his
particular temperament and the precise point which he had reached
in his development as an artist that prepared him so well to represent
war.
Until the last years of his life he was usually considered as a 'rebel',
and as a young painter he did in fact participate in revolutionary
movements. But his instincts, in one essential respect, were those of
a popular painter in that he wished his work to be widely and clearly
intelligible; he wished its impact to be heavy; he wished, in brief, to
share his own strong emotions and impressions with his fellow beings
in general, and he delighted in evoking their response. Even a
hostile response was more acceptable to him than none. Therefore
an event so apocalyptic in the quality of its drama-drama that held
every sentient being in its grip -was one to the representation of
which he was eager to dedicate himself to the utmost of his powers.
In this connexion it is relevant to recall that a number of the artists
C. R. W. NEVINSON 137
who worked on the Western Front avoided war as a subject, and
confined themselves -sometimes to good purpose-to the kinds of
subject which occupied them in times of peace, 'picturesque' build
ings. A modern parish church with roof and windows blasted was
little different from the mediaeval abbey in like condition from the
effects of Reformation and weather. For Nevinson it would have
been an irrelevance, almost blasphemous in its frivolity, to have gone
to the Western Front to pick out 'picturesque bits'; for him the war
was the subject, and from it he never averted his eyes. But such a
disposition to address himself to a great public, and a determination
to extract all that a theme of overwhelming grandeur would yield
up, even supposing considerable artistic powers to have been at their
service, might in the event have accomplished little. Nevinson had
something besides considerable artistic powers: namely experience
that was both recent and intense of two movements which he had
the perception to adapt for his purpose. These were Futurism and
Cubism, The first had taught not only the glory but the social utility
of war, and the glory of machines in general but in particular of
those machines essential to the conduct of modern war: guns, air
craft, armoured cars, warships and the supreme glory of these as
parts of one great war machine. While other painters brooded in
solitude over field or wood, plate of apples or naked girl, arrange
ments of lines and colours, the Futurists exulted in crowds, in speed,
in noise, in conflict, in everything that other painters shunned. That
Nevinson was fully aware of this is clear from an interview he gave
after the end of the war.
This war did not take the modern artist by surprise [he said] ... I think
it can be said that modern artists have been at war since 1912. Every
thing in art was a turmoil . . . the whole talk among artists was of war.
They were turning their attention to boxing and fighting of various
sorts. They were in love with the glory of violence The intellectuals
knew that war was coming before business men . . . and when war came
it found the modern artist equipped with a technique perfectly well
able to express war. 1
Futurism awakened them to a charmed acceptance of the beauties
of the age of the machines, but it did not equip them with a method
of representing mechanized power. For all the talking and writing
1 'The New York Times', 25 May 1919.
138 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
about the power, the speed and the noise of machines, their most
characteristic paintings were not in fact representations of these;
they were exuberantly gay, ballroom-bright kaleidoscopes. Their
simultaneous representation of the successive stages of movements
deprived them of the clarity which is an essential constituent of
power. And it was not an objective art. 'It is by abandoning objective
reality,' wrote Severini, 'that our Futurist painter arrives at an ab
stract and subjective expression/ 1 Assuredly a painter who was a
Futurist and nothing more would have had an unsuitable instrument
to his hand for the representation of the gigantic clash of arms, the
sombre bloodletting of the Western Front.
It was Cubism that gave Nevinson's Futurism the weight and the
clarity that made it so effective an instrument for this purpose. But
it was Cubism with a radical difference.
Few styles or methods in art [Mr. Alfred Barr has truly observed] have
provoked more elaborate theories and analogies than has cubism.
Cubist works have been likened to structural steel, broken mirrors,
Gothic architecture, post-Euclidian geometry, and the drawings of
sufferers from dementia praecox and schizophrenia; Cubism has been
praised-and used-as an academic discipline and damned for its chaotic
licence ... it has been called both a return to classic traditions and a
consequence of reckless revolution. 2
For Nevinson Cubism was none of these; primarily it was some
thing simpler: a means of communicating, at its most intense, the
drama of this most dramatic of all subjects. The Western Front
offered to the painter's contemplation a vast yet infinitely com
plicated panorama, a panorama dominated by the machinery of war.
Nevinson was quick to perceive that out of Cubism, with the licence
it gave to stark, bold simplifications, to the substitution for curves
of jagged angles, to harsh contours, could be formed an instrument
in tune with the machines, which could represent modern war with
shattering effect. For the Cubist pioneers, according to the foremost
among them, 'Cubism is ... an art dealing primarily with forms/ 3
For Nevinson it was a kind of magnificent shorthand perfectly
adapted to convey the simplified essence of a mechanized apocalypse.
1 Artist's introduction to the Gino Severini exhibition catalogue, London,
April 1913.
2 'Picasso, Fifty Years of his Art'. Alfred H, Barr, Jr., 1946, p. 74.
3 'Picasso Speaks'. 'The Arts' (New York), May 1923,
C. R. W. NEVINSON 139
Nothing could be more different than the subtle apprehension of the
complexities of form, the severe remoteness of the early Cubists,
and the harsh eloquence of Nevinson. The fact that it was a vulgari
zation caused Nevinson's Cubism to be discounted by artists and
critics, but it was, at its best, that rare thing in modern times, a
popular language that could be spoken with dignity.
Nevinson began to make use of his opportunities of observing the
Western Front before his discharge from the R.A.M.C. Two of his
best pictures, La Mitrailleuse 1 and The Flooded Trench on the Yser, 2
were painted, he has told us, in two days during the leave granted to
him on the occasion of his marriage, in 1915, to Cathleen Knowl-
man. Directly afterwards he set intensively to work, and by 26
September 1916 he had completed sufficient work to hold a full-
scale exhibition. 3 His war pictures shown earlier in the year -La
Mitrailleuse and two others at the Allied Artists' at the Grafton
Galleries in March and Column on the March* and The Flooded Trench
on the Yser at the London Group -provoked something of a stir,
but his exhibition made a deep impression upon those who saw it; to
many it gave their clearest insight into the great events across the
Channel-in particular almost all the critics were quick to realize that
the deep, harsh note struck by these works was in harmony with the
subject.
It made most of the war art they had seen appear false by com
parison. Even 'The Nation', principal organ of the 'Bloomsburies',
by whom he felt himself treated with a meanness that was a constant
subject of his talk to the end of his life, wrote with respect. 'For the
first time in recent years, the pioneer seems to be seeking a manner/
its notice concluded, 'which will not be merely the amusement of a
coterie, but might, by its directness, its force and its simplicity, appeal
to the unsophisticated perception. I can imagine that even Tolstoy
might have welcomed this rude, strong style, a reaction against the
art of leisure and riches.' 5 'The Times Literary Supplement' devoted
its main article to the elimination of the personal element in modern
war, and took the war pictures of Nevinson as its text, as expressing
1 The Tate Gallery, London. 2 Coll. Mr. Ronald Alley.
8 The Leicester Galleries, September-October.
4 The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Massey Coll.).
5 30 September 1916.
140 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
'his sense that in war man behaves like a machine or part of a
machine, that war is a process in which man is not treated as a human
being but as an item in a great instrument of destruction, in which
he ceases to be a person and becomes lost in a process'. 1 This article is
a fair indication of the seriousness with which Nevinson's war
pictures were regarded. The painter's treatment of this respectful
and fair-minded attempt to place his art in a historical and philo
sophic context is no less indicative of the melancholy effects of his
growing suspicion of intellectuals, which was becoming a disposition
to dislike not only certain intellectual coteries in London but the
operations of the intellect itself. Even after two decades of reflection
he could travesty Glutton-Brock's article into an expression of 'the
opinion of a great many people, particularly of the old Army type,
that the human element, bravery, the Union Jack, were all that
mattered'. 2
The exhibition was crowded. All the exhibits were sold. Arnold
Bennett bought La Patrie\ Sir Michael Sadler-one of the most
influential collectors of contemporary British painting -bought
Column on the March and three other pictures. Nevinson, conscious
of his powers and legitimately proud of the purpose to which he had
put them, elated by success, looked forward with confidence to a
great career. This confidence was shared by many others, including
some whose opinion counted for much. His La Mitrailleuse had been
described by Sickert as 'the most authoritative and concentrated
utterance on the war'.
It is of course too early for final judgments, but looking back it
would seem now that in the autumn of 1916 Nevinson was not on
the- threshold of a career but at its climax. It is difficult to think of
anything he made during the thirty years which remained to him
that compares in energy or in conviction with what he made during
the first two years of the First World War, and difficult to see the
course of his life as a painter otherwise than as a slow decline.
How did it come about that this man, industrious, gifted, re
sourceful, independent and deeply in earnest, should have been
unable to advance beyond the point that he reached when he was
* 'Process or Person. Unsigned but written by Arthur Glutton-Brock, art critic
of The Times'. 5 October 1916.
2 'Paint and Prejudice', p. 87.
C. R. W. NEVINSON 141
twenty-seven, and in spite of the possession of these and other
qualities should have fallen progressively below it? The answer is to
be found, I think, in the spiritual crisis brought upon him by the
difference between his conception of what war would be like, and
what he saw in the hospitals around Dunkirk. He was a humane
man, singularly free from malice, let alone cruelty. Yet he was a
faithful follower of Marinetti and deeply imbued with the Futurists'
gospel of war and their contempt for the humanitarian sentiments to
which war was abhorrent. It would be wrong to suggest that Nevin-
son, in the depths of his being, fully approved, still less that he hoped
for, the coming of any particular war, yet as he himself declared, in
the New York interview already quoted, 'Modern artists have been
at war since 1912. . . . They were in love with the glory of violence.
. . . Some say that artists have lagged behind the war. I should say
not! They were miles ahead of it. They were all ready for the great
machine that is modern war/ It is significant that these words were
spoken after the war, at a time when his own sentiments had
changed. Significant also is the date 1912. It was the date of the Balkan
War which so enchanted Marinetti; it was the date of Nevinson's
own conversion to Futurism, at the Futurist Exhibition held in
London in that year.
So when the First World War came Nevinson could not miss the
chance to experience war at first hand. He had heard his master
imitate the thunder of the guns round Adrianople-at the siege of
which he had been present -and Nevinson knew that such a sound
was but a whimper compared with the thunder of the guns along the
Western Front. He was in love with the Great Machine-scarcely
more than tuning up that sunny autumn- and with noise, speed and
power.
'It was dark when we arrived,' he wrote. 'There was a strong smell
of gangrene, urine and French cigarettes/ That was the deepest, most
personal impression he had of the war: incompetence, corruption,
callousness, the whimpers of maimed and dying men . . . 'the strong
smell of gangrene, urine and French cigarettes'.
In representing with such directness, starkness and force, and with
such particular insight, his early experience of the war, Nevinson
was, as it were, expending his Futurist and Cubist capital. He was
a simple man. The effect of the shock of discovery that war was
142 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
not the mechanized Wagner, all thunder and speed, was not 'the
hygienics of the world', was to shatter his faith not only in the
Futurist glorification of war and in Futurism itself, but, by associa
tion, in Cubism~-in fact in the entire revolutionary spirit in the arts.
So long as he had no time for reflexion, he worked, and worked
brilliantly, in a tradition in which he was losing faith, in a spirit
which was a habit that was being broken. All Nevinson's experience
combined to enable him to represent the war superbly, but the act
of so doing involved the repudiation of that experience.
For many people progress is an inevitable process, operative in
every field of human endeavour, whereby the bad is ameliorated and
the good replaced by the better. This conviction springs from the
belief that human nature seeks and cannot but seek the good and
that but for the malevolent obstruction of a complex of inertia and
vested interest in opposing the beneficent process, of 'reaction' in
fact, it would quickly achieve it.
For such people anything 'advanced' is of necessity better than
what it replaces. So much is self-evident, and to doubt it is a betrayal
of progress. It is as simple as that. When Nevinson was growing up
it seemed simpler still. 'Progress' was accepted as a great self-evident
fact. There had been no blood-lettings on a world-wide scale to dis
grace the human species; there had been no such complicating factors
as, for instance, the brusquest repudiation by States in certain respects
socially progressive of 'progressive' art. In 1914 a man was either
'of his time', a progressive, or else he formed part of the menacing
shadow that stood between mankind and the sun.
The young Nevinson was a simple man for whom the distinction
between opposing forces was particularly sharp. On the one side was
militant dynamism, 'in love with violence', the Great Machine its
supreme creation; on the other, traitor pioneers 'refusing to resume
the march', decadence, mediocrity, morris-dancing, in two words,
'passeist filth'.
For all his talk of violence Nevinson was a humane man. The sight
of those broken men at Dunkirk lying neglected in the stinking
darkness, and the sound of their cries for their mothers, was a
memory that was always with him.
According to my understanding, this experience began a process
which transformed Nevinson's whole outlook on life. It was plain
C. R. W. NEVINSON 143
that morris-dancing could not have been responsible for the mutila
tion of these men; it was not long before it occurred to him that they
might be victims of his old love Violence'. If Violence' could have
such degrading consequences- Violence' that was the most glorious
mark of 'dynamism' -how could Futurism remain, in his eyes, a
glorious movement? He realized that if the Great Machine was to
function- and in repose it was without meaning -then it needed
victims: victims such as the remains of men who had lain in that dark
shed. And if the Great Machine needed victims to fulfil itself, how
could he not suspect that not Futurism only but the whole pro
gressive movement had a dark side? A more analytic mind might
have disassociated the purely aesthetic elements in Futurism from
the bombast and the automobilism, and might have argued that
Cubism might be valid simply as a way of painting; but Nevinson
was of a simplicity and a wholeheartedness to whom the weighing
of pros and cons was repugnant: his was one of those natures in
whom the tides run quickly in or out. His humanity, revolted by
war which his master had glorified, led him first to doubt and
eventually to abhor the validity of the progressive movement in all
its manifestations.
As a man who has lost his religious faith may long retain habits of
observance, so Nevinson retained much of the air of a progressive.
It was not until after his election as an Associate of the Royal
Academy in 1939, 1 fancy, that he altogether ceased to think of him
self as a 'rebel'. By then he had long ceased to be anything but a
realist of a highly conventional type, and the effects of the change
which Dunkirk had set off were to be seen with remarkable
promptitude.
In July 1917 he was sent to the Western Front as an Official War
Artist, where he spent several months making rapid shorthand
sketches, chiefly, he has told us, from memory, 1 but also 'in the front
line, behind the lines, above the lines in observation balloons'. 2 In
the following March an exhibition of his war pictures in various
mediums was held in London. They are various, enterprising and
accomplished, but, in comparison with the pictures shown two years
1 Preface to Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures of War by C. R.W. Nevin-
con. The Leicester Galleries, March 1918.
2 Ibid.
MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
before, they are the works of a man without conviction. The savage
feeling of outrage, the sharp cutting edge, the sombreness, the
weight, all survive only in feeble parody. The pictures shown in
1918 might be the works of a disciple of the Nevinson of 1916, so
tame is their imagery. The declension may be seen at a glance by
comparing one of the best of the later paintings, Roads of France,
Field Artillery and Infantry, 1 with the earlier Column on the March. The
themes of the two are closely similar; yet what a difference there is
between them! The second is treated with audacious resilience:
under a sky of burning blue the column stretches on for ever. 'The
soft thud of the men's feet as they march along the road/ wrote Sir
Osbert Sitwell, 'can almost be caught by our ears, and we can almost
see the shadows on the cobbles moving as they march.' 2 The soldiers
in the first kick up a little dust, but they do not compel us to listen
for their footsteps; we are not interested, for they are only toy
soldiers.
During his first war exhibition a reporter asked Nevinson whether
he was going to repeat his success and paint more war pictures.
'No/ he replied, 'I have painted everything I saw in France, and
there will be no more/ 3 At the time he was, of course, unaware of
the further opportunities shortly to be offered to him, but the words
have a prophetic ring.
For almost thirty years the decline continued. From time to time
he painted a picture of merit. The skyscrapers of Manhattan struck
in him a spark of the old Cubist fire; an occasional London street or
twilight view of the Thames stirred deeply his interest in people and
places: indeed for a painter as vivid in feeling and as rich in resource
this could hardly have been otherwise. Shocked by his humanity out
of the tradition, the way of seeing and the way of painting best
suited to foster the gifts of this greatly gifted man, Nevinson, lost
and enervated, more often made literal representations of landscape
or embarrassing fantasies such as Pan Triumphant 4 ' or The Tiventieth
Century. 5 And as his art declined his suspicion of precise thought
1 The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
2 'C. R. W. Nevinson: Contemporary British Artists'. Text by Osbert Sitwell,
1925, p. 29.
3 The 'Daily Mirror', 18 October 1916.
4 Coll. Mr. and Mrs. Barney Scale.
5 Coll. The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
C. R. W. NEVINSON 145
grew more insistent, and his hatred of 'intellectuals' tempted him to
speak over their heads to the public at large, and in the role of *out-
spoken rebel' he contributed, with increasing frequency, his views
to the popular Press. Articles such as 'Do Beautiful Women get
away with it?' 1 , 'Pretty Women: are there any left?', 2 'She lived a
life of Luxury', 3 'Making an Age of Faith', 4 appeared at times with a
regularity that would have done credit to a full-time journalist. He
addressed meetings upon every kind of topic 'My last appearance
at that time', runs a characteristic sentence in his autobiography, 'was
at a luncheon given by the Happy Thought Society. . . .' 5
This continuous spate of vulgar publicity and his pathological
touchiness made the older Nevinson an easy target. But a target at
which anyone who knew him would be reluctant to aim. To be an
oracle can be gratifying and remunerative, but there was something
tragic in the spectacle of this man's being forced, by his life-long
sense of singularity, his exacerbated sense of ill-usage by intellectuals,
to cast his net so indiscriminately in search of admiration and
affection. Tragic this would have been in any case, but it was
particularly so in the case of Nevinson. He was not only an artist
of high gifts but a kindly man and an entertaining companion, and
a host of extraordinary charm, to whom Mr. Crawley's description
of Mr. Toogood might appropriately be applied, 'a man who con
ceals a warm heart, and an active spirit, and healthy sympathies,
under an affected jocularity of manner, and almost with a touch of
vulgarity'. With what eagerness I used to await the parties that he
and his wife gave at I Steele's Studios, off Haverstock Hill. One
entered the big room, crowded with 'celebrities' of stage and screen,
of Chelsea and Fleet Street, and made one's way to the centre of the
vortex, Nevinson himself, stout, portentous, talking loudly-about
himself. I well remember on the first such occasion going up to him
to pay my respects, with his booming voice like a fog-horn to guide
me through the crowd. 'Poor girls, poor girls,' he was saying,
'sooner or later they all tell me I'm the love of their lives ! I give it
1 'The Sunday Graphic', 30 November 1930.
2 'The Daily Express', 29 October 1930.
3 'The Sunday Express', 22 March 1931.
4 'The Sunday Referee', 30 August 1931.
5 'Paint and Prejudice', p. 201.
146 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
up. I can't explain it. I'm fat, ugly, promiscuous and indifferent.
What do you make of it?'
There was a point at which, in the planning of these studies, I
decided to omit Nevinson, so little sympathy was I able to feel with
the greater part of his work and so persistent my distaste for writing
about that which I cannot admire. The longer I reflected, however,
the more clearly was it borne in upon me that even if the later years
of his life were productive of little of outstanding merit, the two
first years or so of the First World War were years passed in a theatre
of action so magnificent, apprehended with such an intensity of
feeling and expressed with a power so worthy of the feeling which
it conveyed, that they were able to produce as many paintings of out
standing merit as other subjects of these studies produced in their
entire lives. I look back with shame at the moment when I con
sidered passing over the painter not only of La Patrie, La Mitrailleuse,
Column on the March, but of On the Road to Ypres, 1 of 1915, A Dawn,
1914? of 1916, After a Push,* of 1916, of From an Office Window, 41 of
1917, a group of figures in landscape, which manifest a sense of
colour less conspicuous later on, such as A Thames Regatta? of two
admirable Self-Portraits, of 191 1 6 and I9I5, 7 and a memorable view,
Barges on the Thames* of about 1916.
1 Coll. Mr. Clive Morris. 2 Whereabouts unknown.
3 The Imperial War Museum, London. 4 Coll. Sir Osbert Sitwell, Bt.
5 Coll. Lieut. G. Hoskins. 6 The Tate Gallery, London,
7 Coll. Mr. Adolph Lewisohn. 8 The City Art Gallery, Manchester.
EDWARD WADS WORTH
1889-1949
IN 1914 the name of Wadsworth-a young painter who had left
the Slade only two years before- was fixing truculently in the face
of the public. 'Vital English Art. Futurist Manifesto', signed
*F. T. Marinetti, Italian Futurist Movement (Milan), C. R. W.
Nevinson, Art Rebel Centre, London' concluded with the following
appeal: "So we call upon the English public to support, defend and
glorify the genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and
advance-forces of vital English Art.' To it were appended, in bold
black type, the names of the nine artists in whom these 'advance
forces' were personified. One of these is Wadsworth's. 1
His membership of the Vorticist Group and his contributions to
'Blast' and to the Vorticist Exhibition 2 confirmed the impression of
him as a member of the extreme advance guard in general and a
disciple of Wyndham Lewis in particular. His paintings for the most
part were essays, competent but undistinguished, in the Cubism that
based itself upon the more formal aspects of the work of Cezanne-
paintings of a kind and quality common in Paris and among all those
groups outside France which looked for leadership to Paris. His
drawings, especially the dynamic abstracts which were the most
characteristic part of his production, closely resembled those of
Wyndham Lewis. These drawings, as is often the case with mani
festations of a new movement, are marked by an energy, in spite of
his discipleship of the movement's leader, that was lacking in his
academic studies in the manner of Cezanne's followers. The close
resemblance between the work of Wadsworth and that of Wynd
ham Lewis did not deceive at least one observer. To Mr. Ezra
Pound, friend and advocate of the Vorticists, it was apparent that
Wadsworth and Wyndham Lewis were different kinds of men.
From a distance of more than forty years and with the knowledge
1 The others are Atkinson, Bomberg, Epstein, Etchells, Hamilton, Nevinson.
Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.
2 Which included four paintings and four drawings by Wadsworth.
J47
148 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
of their later work this is clear enough, but it took some wit to per
ceive it then. In 'Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist' in 'The Egoist' of
15 August 1914 Mr. Pound admirably drew this radical distinction
between them.
Mr. Lewis is restless, turbulent, intelligent, bound to make himself felt.
If he had not been a vorticist painter he would have been a vorticist
something else. He is a man full of sudden, illuminating antipathies . . .
a mind always full of thought, subtle, swift-moving.
A man with this kind of intelligence is bound always to be crashing
and opposing and breaking. You cannot be as intelligent in that sort of
way, without being prey to the furies.
If, on the other hand, Mr. Wadsworth had not been a vorticist
painter he would have been some other kind of painter. Being a good
painter, born in England in such and such a year of our era, the time,
the forces of nature, made him a vorticist. It is as hard to conceive
Mr. Wadsworth expressing himself in any other medium save paint as
it is to conceive Mr. Lewis remaining unexpressed. . . . Ones differentia
tion of [their work] arranges itself almost as a series of antitheses.
Turbulent energy: repose. Anger: placidity.
It is natural that Mr. Lewis should give us pictures of intelligence
gnashing teeth with stupidity . . . and that he should stop design and
burst into scathing criticism. . . .
I cannot recall any painting of Mr. Wadsworth's where he seems to
be angry. There is a delight in mechanical beauty, a delight in the
beauty of ships, or of crocuses, or a delight in pure form. He liked this,
that or the other, and so he sat down to paint it.
This prescient appreciation published when Wadsworth was
twenty-five, and, for less acute observers, a mute disciple of Wynd-
ham Lewis, insists upon the important fact that Wadsworth was,
before everything else, a painter. It suggests that the particular form
which his painting assumed was largely a consequence of the
intellectual and emotional climate of the time and place in which he
was born, and that he chose his subjects because he happened to like
them. In the course of his contrasting sketches Mr. Pound has given
an indication of the kind of artist Wadsworth was.
Edward Alexander Wadsworth was born on 29 October 1889, at
Highfield, Cleckheaton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the only
child of Fred Wadsworth and his first wife Hannah Smith. Fred
EDWARD WADSWORTH 149
Wadsworth was the second son of Elmyas Wadsworth, who,
beginning as an overseer, showed such energy and inventiveness as
enabled him to establish Broomfield Mills, an important worsted
spinning concern which bore his name. A tribute to Fred Wads-
worth by the Minister of the Westgate Congregational Church with
which he was associated for many years in several capacities, among
others as voluntary organist, records that 'his mind was of the
critical and analytic type'. 1 It is significant that among the artist's
immediate forebears we find energy and inventiveness, love of
music and an analytic cast of mind.
Edward Wadsworth was sent to a preparatory school at Ilkley, to
Fettes College, Edinburgh, and to Munich to perfect his knowledge
of German. In his spare time he attended the Knirr Art School; for
the idea that he must become an artist and not a worsted spinner had
already taken a firm hold upon him. He had already taken the
decision to become a painter. This decision became an issue with his
family, who eventually, dourly but without resentment, gave way.
Wadsworth spent a few months at the Bradford School of Art
where he won a scholarship to the Slade. Here he studied from 1908
until 1912. It was not long before the steady application and the
efficiency which marked all his activities justified his decision to be
an artist. In 1911 he was awarded the first prize for figure painting
at the Slade, and he painted a Self-portrait 2 with a turban- an excel
lently characterized representation of his own sardonic face, with its
eyebrows bushy and low-set and its wide mouth habitually com
pressed. The taut, purposeful, rather ruthless face suggests that he
was already a man dedicated to his vocation. The portrait has often
been reproduced but I doubt whether it is generally realized that it
is a portrait of the artist at twenty-two.
During his last year at the Slade and the following year he painted,
besides the conventional post-Cezanne studies mentioned earlier,
pictures in the manner of the Camden Town Group, such, for
instance, as Portrait of Mrs. Harold Oilman* of 1912, and at least one
in the manner of the Fauves, a beach-scene 4 made at Havre in 1911.
1 'The Cleckheaton Guardian', 7 January 1921.
2 Coll. Mrs. Edward Wadsworth.
3 Coll. Mrs. Harold Oilman.
4 Destroyed in the Second World War.
150 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
In 1912 he married Fanny Eveleigh, a violinist. After their
marriage Wadsworth and his wife spent six months abroad, going
first to Madeira and Las Palmas, where he painted a number of panels,
of which none appear to be extant, and later to Paris where he worked
daily on landscape subjects on the city's outskirts, completing
another series of panels which have likewise disappeared. On their
return to London they established themselves over a furniture shop
at 2 Gloucester Walk, Campden Hill.
It was probably in 1913 that he made a friend who quickened his
imagination and gave him an insight into its nature. Returning home
after a day's work at the Omega Workshops (where he was briefly
employed, among other tasks, upon the repair of the Mantegna
cartoons at Hampton Court) he said to his wife, I've met an
interesting man; he's coming to see us.' A few days later Wyndham
Lewis called. The burning preoccupation of his new friend with art
politics (as indeed with politics of every kind) drew Wadsworth
into the Vorticist movement, and into participation in its various
manifestations. He contributed not only to the Vorticist Exhibition,
to 'Blast', but also to Group X which represented a post-war effort
to revive it. Their close association continued until 1920; thereafter
the intervals between their meetings grew longer.
Wadsworth, in spite of his refusal to become an engineer, had a
life-long passion for machinery, and with this passion went a love of
hard textures id powerful, streamlined forms. This and a frank
enjoyment of the dynamic manifestations of contemporary life
evoked in him a sympathy with the Futurist movement. Thus pre
disposed, it was easy for Wyndham Lewis to persuade him to share
his own violent but nevertheless more mature and rational attitude
towards the arts, and his contempt for 'the fuss and hysterics of the
Futurists'. To his association with Wyndham Lewis he owed the
rudiments of a philosophy, which by justifying strengthened his own
innate predilections, and a bracing intellectual companionship.
Without this association he might have been tempted to adopt
styles and subjects imperfectly suited to his innermost needs. For a
time he became a disciple: many of his drawings were tidier but less
dynamic versions of his master's. Such drawings, however, were so
competent and assured that he came to be regarded, next to Wynd
ham Lewis, as the representative Vorticist. To Mr. Pound the truth
EDWARD WADSWORTH 15!
was plain: he owed, his Vorticism to accidents of time and place, but
he was quintessentially a painter. In being a painter in this special
sense he resembles Steer. Their paintings, of course, could hardly be
more different: Steer's atmospheric and suffused with a generous
and languid poetry; Wadsworth's metallic and sharply exact. But
both men, though in their different ways intelligent men, neither
felt nor reasoned deeply about anything but painting. It is a common
place that however purely aesthetic a work of art may be it expresses
the outlook on the world of the man who made it. Sometimes the
maker is a man with very positive ideas to communicate, a man such
as Leonardo, Michelangelo, David or Delacroix, and in our own
time Stanley Spencer or Wyndham Lewis; sometimes he is a man
content simply to accept current ideas as motives for his pictures
without being greatly concerned about their significance. If such
ideas provide sufficient pretexts for the full exercise of his faculties
as a painter, they are all he requires. Steer and Wadsworth are both
notable contemporary examples of that class-to which indeed the
great majority belongs-which simply takes from the repertory of
current ideas such as they find to be, as Mr. Berenson would say,
'life enhancing'. Steer added nothing of substance to what Turner,
Constable and the Impressionists had already communicated: he
selected certain ideas from their repertory to which he gave a slight
personal touch when he restated them with a relaxed largeness and
dignity and a mastery of his mediums which gives him a foremost
place among the English painters of his time. At first glance Wads-
worth seems in this respect to belong to a quite different category.
The complexity and precision of his compositions, his preference for
motives specifically modern, the streamlined, sophisticated look of
his work, all suggest the presence of a vigorous, even an adventurous,
intellect. But at a first glance only. Closer examination shows that he
took from others the ideas and motives he needed to nourish his art,
from Chirico, Lur^at, Leger, Pierre Roy and Wyndham Lewis; that
like Steer, Wadsworth was a pure painter. I once asked his wife
whether he had any interest in religion, philosophy or politics. 'None
whatever, and least of all in the politics of art,' she answered; 'painting
was his only interest, and with him discussion of other subjects came
quickly back to painting/ 'It was the same,' she added, 'with his
reading; he read various kinds of books in French and German as
152 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
well as English, but the only books that absorbed him, that he re
turned to, were books on painting, and most of all, books on the
technique of painting. As for Cennino Cennini's treatise, 1 he read it
again and again-he was always reading it.' Wadsworth's disinterest
in everything other than painting extended to people-he was a
steady friend and good company, but human relations played almost
as little part in his scheme of things as figures played in his art.
The development of Vorticism was arrested by the First World
War. Wadsworth's experiences of the war were reflected in his art.
From 1915 until 1917 when he was invalided home, he served as an
Intelligence Officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in the
Eastern Mediterranean, and was stationed on the island of Mudros.
On his recovery he was engaged with other painters on the dazzle-
camouflage of ships at various ports. He worked mainly at Liverpool
and Bristol and he superintended the application of camouflage
designs upon over two thousand ships in less than a year, including
the eight hundred foot long 'Aquitania'.
It is reasonable to suppose that these circumstances offered no new
revelation but that they confirmed his innate way of seeing: the
sight of classical civilization and the clear Mediterranean light his
predilection for what was rational and lucid; the designing of
camouflage his predilection for geometrical form; and the whole of
it his passion for the sea.
An exhibition of his woodcuts held in 1919 at the Adelphi Gallery 2
of a variety of subjects, Greek towns and harbours, ships dazzle-
camouflaged and pure abstractions, was received with serious
attention unqualified by the hostility which might have been
expected, considering how conspicuously Cubist they were. Indeed
he received praise even in the popular Press for the frankness of his
Cubism: 'He has not halted between Cubism and Naturalism',
observed, for instance, 'The Weekly Despatch', 'or backed out of
Cubism like C. R. W. Nevinson.' 3 At no time did Wadsworth's
work provoke the hostility which the work of artists belonging to
extreme and uncompromising movements usually provokes. This
circumstance seems to be worth noting, as it is not due to the chance
disposition of critics but to the character of the work. It is the
original idea which shocks and Wadsworth's art was never the
1 'Trattato della Pittura'. 2 Duke Street, Adelphi. 3 23 March 1919.
EDWARD WADSWORTH 153
expression of original ideas: his disposition was to take the ideas he
found useful from the common stock and to express them with a
workmanlike perfection of finish which won the respect of spectators
of varying principles and tastes. Finish of so meticulous a kind
suggests a willingness to take an infinity of pains which is apt to
disarm the critic. Even the Vorticist Suggestion for a Building, which
Wadsworth exhibited 1 late the same year, was taken in good part
though it could hardly have represented a more extravagant de
parture from any architectural tradition. His contributions to 'Works
of Camoufleur Artists and Examples of Camouflage' 2 were regarded
as outstanding.
Wadsworth was recognized, in fact, as one of the most promising
artists of his generation. Early in 1920 there occurred an event which
caused judges whose opinion counted for much to consider his
promise abundantly fulfilled. This was the exhibition of a series of
industrial landscape drawings entitled The Black Country. 3 Arnold
Bennett wrote the preface to the catalogue.
Wadsworth did not discover industry as a subject: earlier artists,
Sir Charles Holmes, for instance, and Joseph Pennell, had stressed its
general impressiveness and mystery, the picturesqueness of scaffold
ing and cranes seen through billowing smoke. But it had been repre
sented, as a rule, romantically from afar, and by artists who knew
little about it at first hand. Wadsworth was not a romantic and since
childhood had been familiar with industry; but for his firmness of
purpose he would have been an industrialist himself.
He regarded his subject without illusions but with intimate
knowledge; he regarded it as the dramatic and appropriate content
for the forms he had evolved under Vorticist discipline. His imagina
tion was stirred by the gloomy grandeur of this wilderness of slag:
he came to it with those acute perceptions with which men return
to scenes formerly familiar, and he came ideally prepared by his
researches in abstract form to see a rhythmic order in smoking chaos.
'He is the fortunate man,' said one critic, 'who first made a map of
the country he intended to find and then went out and found it/ 4
1 Practical Arts, an exhibition organised by the Arts League of Service at the
Twenty-One Gallery, Durham House Street, Adelphi,
2 Burlington House, October 1919. 3 The Leicester Galleries, January.
4 'The New Age', 29 January 1920.
154 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
These were remarkable drawings, remarkable both for the hard
logic of their designing and for the immediacy and the sureness with
which the vastness and the blighted gloom of the region, the over
whelming energy and scale of the whole industrial process, had been
seized: the blast furnaces and the great flames they send upwards,
the tides of lava and the endless mountains of slag, the indisposable
waste. It was among the blast furnaces, Wyndham Lewis con
sidered, that the true Wadsworth was to be found. It is my own
belief, too, that he made nothing finer than The Black Country.
It is strange that having occupied himself with a subject to which
his earlier experience had ideally attuned him, and made what he
must have known were pictures of outstanding quality, he should
have failed to continue to work this vein, but instead have faltered
and turned away. I can offer only a tentative explanation. The Black
Country drawings were made in 1919. During 1920 and 1921 he
made several paintings of industrial subjects. These showed few of
the qualities of The Black Country, and were no more than elaborate
essays in the conventional cubist manner. Then gradually first rural
and then Mediterranean replaced industrial subjects, but not, I think,
to the pictures' advantage. My explanation turns upon the death of
Wadsworth's father. This took place at the beginning of 1921, before
Wadsworth had found the means of perfecting his large industrial
subjects. One consequence was that he inherited a considerable
fortune, which enabled him to gratify his passion for the sea in
general and the Mediterranean in particular. Thenceforward he
spent little time in the Midlands and the North of England, and much
in Italy and the South of France. It seems to me, then, that in the
early nineteen-twenties Wadsworth lost his way. I am fortified in
this opinion by the knowledge that the artist himself destroyed a
substantial number of these Cubist essays, including industrial, rural
and Mediterranean subjects.
It was not long, however, before his passion for the sea gave his
development a new impetus and a new direction. Around 1922 he
abandoned oil paint for tempera, a medium well suited to those who
desire clarity above all else and who are indifferent both to atmo
sphere and to the 'painterly' effects that can be obtained only with
pigments mixed with oil. The new medium, more especially when
employed to make pictures of his chosen subject, the sea, produced
EDWARD WADSWORTH 155
bracing effects. It should be mentioned here that, in spite of his
maritime obsession, he was not in the ordinary sense a painter of the
sea at all. A painter beside the sea, not of it, was what Zadkine 1 truly
called him, and this is just what he was: a painter of harbours, ships,
jetties, shells, marine instruments and the like, but of the sea itself
only as a background or in a subordinate place, and always dead
calm.
Inspired by Turner's The Harbours of England he embarked upon
a series of paintings of the principal ports of the United Kingdom,
but I have been unable to ascertain how far he carried it. During
1923 he painted Seaport 2 and some other port subjects in which his
efforts to build up compositions complex yet closely knit that should
convey an effect of stability are too obvious, and they fail of their
effect. But at the end of that year and again in 1924 he visited Dun
kirk, where his earlier efforts reaped a rich and sudden reward. The
result of these visits was a small group of paintings of sailing ships
in port of extraordinary quality. The finest of these, Dunkerque? of
1924 (Plate 13), shows him as a composer of exceptional resource
and an impeccable craftsman in an academic style of commanding
elegance.
On a number of occasions since I have been Director of the Tate,
the Gallery has come under criticism on account of alleged pre
occupation with 'advanced 5 art to the exclusion of the academic, and
when the first volume of these studies appeared the absence of certain
academic painters was noted. The truth is that in this century of
perpetual change the larger number of the finest talents tend to be
drawn into one or other of the 'advanced' movements, so that
worthy examples of academic art are very far from commonly met
with. But in these Dunkirk pictures of Wadsworth's the classical
tradition lives again in all its limpid harmony.
Yet meditation upon the very success of these attempts at repre
senting the thing before the eyes in terms of a beauty entirely
classical, serves, it seems to me, to make one more rather than less
conscious of how unfavourable the climate of the twentieth century
is to traditional painting, and how positively it seems to foster
1 'Edward Wadsworth', No. XIII Editions Selection, with tributes by Waldemar
George, Michael Sevier and Ossip Zadkine. Antwerp, 193 3-
2 Coll. Mrs. B. C. Windeler, 3 The City Art Gallery, Manchester.
156 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
change. For here in the Dunkirk series we have a painter able to
combine exact representation of a subject to which he responded
with passion, with conformity to the severest canons of traditional
design, yet free of the complacent touch which often vitiates so many
academic works, and marked, indeed, with an astringent con
temporary tang; yet nothing could be plainer than that this particular
combination of virtues afforded to the painter himself only the most
transient satisfaction. It is difficult to estimate precisely how exten
sive the series originally was, as one at least, and possibly more, was
destroyed by the painter, but it can scarcely have extended to more
than half a dozen. There was no question of his taking the series as a
basis for a traditional style: as a man very much * of his time' he was
under a compulsion to press forward. It is my belief that until so
many of the best artists cease to be subject to such a compulsion and
become less liable to suffer, as so many do, from a sense of failure,
of guilt even, unless they are for ever on the move, painting cannot
recover the perfection that can result only from repeated attempts to
attain the same objective. An objective in rapid and continuous
movement may evoke an inventive, audacious, exciting art, but not
one in any proper sense of the term 'classical'.
From the Dunkirk series Wadsworth, then, promptly moved on:
first to ships in harbour of a more generalized character, scenes upon
which, to their seeming discomfort, a pattern was somewhat
arbitrarily imposed. 1 His interest in ships culminated, in 1926, in the
publication of a book, 'Sailing Ships and Barges of the Western
Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas', for which Wadsworth made
engravings on copper afterwards coloured by hand. 2 It is a book of
interest and beauty, the aim of which was primarily to serve as a
fittingly exquisite record of a disappearing means of transport. The
making of these engravings fulfilled his need to represent ships, for
after 1926, although his passion for the sea remained, ships entire
figure rarely in his work.
About the same time another subject engaged his interest a very
'period' interest this -the architecture and to a limited extent the life,
1 A characteristic example, of which a photograph survives, was destroyed by
the artist: others belong to Mr. Walter Wadsworth and Mrs. Margaret Drew.
2 With a preface and brief descriptions by Bernard Windeler. Published by
Etchells and Macdonald, Frederick Etchells being an associate in the Vorticist Group.
EDWARD WADSWORTH 157
more especially its seamy side, of Southern France. This interest
issued in drawings and occasional paintings of streets in Marseilles,
Toulon and other ports, narrow streets of ancient fantastically
intricate buildings, enlivened with festoons of washing or by flam
boyant signs advertising sailors' bordels. A characteristic example is
Marseilles, 1 of 1925, a lively picture, but neither the subject nor the
spirit in which it is represented is particularly Wadsworth's own.
The treatment of the architecture is slight and similar to that of
others, to that of his friend Richard Wyndham for example, and the
evocation of the life of sailors' bistro and bordel lacks altogether the
sinister insight of their younger contemporary Edward Burra.
Both formalized shipping-in-harbour (glimpsed sometimes through
parted curtains) and narrow street were trivial deviations, for it was
about the time when he was engaged upon such themes that he
gained a deeper insight into what he wanted to accomplish. That is
to say, he began the long series of still-lifes of a highly personal kind
upon which he was principally engaged for the rest of his life, and
which, in fact, must be regarded as his most characteristic works.
These still-lifes might be taken at first glance for examples of
the kind of fantastic painting which the Surrealist movement was
inspiring, but closer scrutiny reveals its personal character.
Wadsworth's practice of placing together objects which have no
congruity with one another he learnt from Surrealism, but the ele
ment of fantasy ends with the choice of objects: his representation of
them is as precise as a highly skilled craftsman could make it. Not for
him watches hanging limply over clothes-lines; his shells, hurricane-
lamps, sextants, floats, chains, coils of twine, blueprints, binoculars,
propellers and other marine objects, as well as occasional ribbons,
masks and flowers, are never placed in positions which, in the world
of reality, they would be unable to sustain; all conform to laws of
construction, of gravitation and of perspective; all are laid upon
foundations which will bear their weight, and all are capable of
function. (Even the liberties he seems to take with the scale of
objects-with sea-shells, for instance, which sometimes loom
enormous in his foregrounds -may be only apparent, for he is known
to have made a collection of the largest Mediterranean shells.) For
the most part these assemblies of sharply incongruous objects are
1 The City Art Gallery, Leeds.
158 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
law-abiding citizens of a scheme of things which closely corresponds
to the natural. More closely, in one important respect, to Mediter
ranean than to northern nature, for they are placed in a setting where
the atmosphere has no density or movement and where everything
is without motion and bathed in a merciless white light. These still-
lifes are the culmination of his steady, consistent evolution, the final
expressions of his lucid, logical and supremely unequivocal mind.
One excellent example out of many, Little Western flower^ of 1928, is
reproduced on Plate 14.
Law-abiding as they are, they are none the less expressions of a
personality. How definitely was shown by an experiment. Certain
visitors to an exhibition 2 of his paintings in tempera held in 1929
criticized his method as 'excessively photographic'. Doubtful whether
this criticism was well founded, and eager, moreover, to demon
strate the camera's powers, two gifted photographers, Mr. Maurice
Beck and Miss McGregor, set up a number of still-lifes closely
resembling those of Wadsworth, of which they made photographs.
Three of these were reproduced in 'The Graphic' 3 beside three photo
graphs of still-life paintings by Wadsworth. The confrontation
clarifies the contrast between painting and photography, and re
veals once again how superior is the power of the painter, by a
hundred delicate touches, to emphasize certain forms and certain
contrasts and affinities, to mute others in a way that is not open to a
photographer, who has the power only to select, even when, as in
the present instance, he also arranged the subject. The painter's
superior power of communication is particularly well illustrated
by this particular confrontation, because Wadsworth's method of
painting in tempera is one that reveals no brushstrokes, which with
most painters are the instrument whereby accents -highlights, for
instance, or contours distinguishing forms that merge in nature and
the like-are emphasized.
Towards the end of the nineteen-twenties Wadsworth's interest
in pure still-life waned: it shows itself thenceforward most often in
the foregrounds of his harbours, beaches or distant prospects of the
sea. This change was followed by another, a change not of vision
but of method. Around 1938 the sharply defined contours and the
1 Coll. Mr. J.E. Barton.
2 At Messrs. Arthur Tooth and Son, from 23 May until 8 June. 3 30 August
EDWARD WADSWORTH 159
enamel-like quality of his colour were radically modified by the
influence of Seurat: it was as though Wadsworth's paintings of
earlier days-for the compositions altered little-were seen through a
fine mesh, which at once lightened and broke their surfaces. Pictures
painted in dots reflect, it seems to me, the particular character of
"Wadsworth's mind less immediately than those painted with sharp
outlines in surfaces of clear, continuous colour. A few of the pictures
painted according to a method close to Seurat's, however, take a
high place among his works, notably Reguiescat* of February 1940.
Although the Seurat method was liable to be used by him from time
to time for the rest of his life, it was rarely manifest after the early
'forties in quite such forthright terms as in, for instance, Quistreham,
Caen, 2 of May 1939, which is nothing more than an accomplished
Seurat schoolpiece. I think he had reservations of some kind about
this method, and this opinion is strengthened by a note he made
beneath a photograph of a painting entitled Harbour Entrance* of
April 1939, 'Repainted 1944 and spots obliterated.' In a number of
works of the 'forties the size of the dots is diminished to restore the
primacy of the sharply defined contour, in such pictures, for
instance, as the two versions of Bronze Ballet,* of March and April,
and April and May 1940.
My attempt to give an indication of the character and growth of
Wadsworth as a painter of still-life has led me to leave behind an
important development in his art, of which his still-lifes formed the
point of departure during the late 'twenties, namely, his participation
in the abstract movement.
There was not, I think, at work in Wadsworth that strong innate
tendency towards abstraction of which no student of the work of,
say, Mondriaan or Ben Nicholson can be unaware. But there were
other reasons which made him sympathetic to its appeal. Like the
Futurists who had made so stimulating a din at a time when he was
highly susceptible to what was going on around him, sentimentally
he was, as already noted, a man very much 'of his time', responsive
to the beauty of machinery, in particular to that of the big fast motor
cars he owned, and even had especially built. At the same susceptible
1 The City Art Gallery, Leeds. 2 Coll. Mrs. Edward Wadsworth.
8 Coll. Mrs. Edward Wadsworth.
4 Coll. Sir Arthur Bliss and The Tate Gallery, London.
I6O MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
age, too, abstract art, in the guise of Vorticism, was demonstrated
by Wyndham Lewis to be both a powerful and an intellectually
valid means of expression. When the full force of the abstract move
ment struck England, in the 'thirties, Wadsworth was well prepared
to yield to its impact. The impact of abstraction may be seen in the
most graphic terms in certain of his still-lifes of 1929 and 1930.
Reference was made a few pages back to the strict conformity of
Wadsworth's still-lifes to the laws of gravity and perspective. In these
still-lifes of 1929 and 1930, however, it is as though the natural laws,
especially the law of gravitation, were suspended, and a process of
disintegration had set in. A characteristic example of this kind of
still-life in which the objects represented, released from the law of
gravitation, whirl about in the void, is Composition. 1 This anarchic
phase was temporary; before long 'objects' tended to disappear, to
merge into or be replaced by abstract forms, subject not to the laws
of nature but to those of pure design.
Wadsworth's abstracts, an important feature of his work of the
early 'thirties, showed the same meticulous workmanship and the
same power of making statements that are perfectly lucid and un
equivocal as all his paintings. I have never known a painter demand
of himself so exacting a standard of technical perfection or any to
destroy so many of his works in the belief that they fell below it.
Among the many were a number-to judge from photographs and
recollection- of the finest of these taut, energetic abstracts of the
early 'thirties. One of these, or rather a near abstract, impinged
suddenly upon public attention, and became the focus of an incident
which had international repercussions. In the autumn of 1938 Wads-
worth was commissioned by the London Passenger Transport Board
to design a poster for the Lord Mayor's Show. The procession was
predominantly a military parade that year, and the artist accordingly
incorporated a machine gun and a Lewis gun into his design. Six
thousand copies of the poster were displayed when, a few days before
the show took place, 'Cassandra', otherwise Mr. William Connor,
attacked the poster in 'The Daily Mirror'. If we are to show the
beauty of engines of war to a peaceful travelling public, why not
have the guts,' he asked, 'to show the effects of these instruments?
Or would pictures of bullet-riddled bodies be a trifle unseemly?' An
1 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
EDWARD WADSWORTH l6l
official of the London Passenger Transport Board explained that
they had originally planned to have a design 'embodying a golden
coach', and the offending posters were taken down-barely twenty
months before an all but disarmed Britain had to fight the gigantic
German military machine. The incident appears to have been used
widely in the German Press to show that Britain was 'too tired to
fight': the Berlin 'Boersen Zeitung', for instance, carried a two-
column headline 'England's recruiting need-the Government has
to protect itself against Marxist demagogues.'
That year Wadsworth was much before the public. He designed
and carried out two paintings for the First and Cabin Class smoke-
rooms in the new liner 'Queen Mary', which were so large-they
measured about 12 X 8 and 9x6 feet respectively -that the parish
hall at Maresfield-the Sussex village where he had settled ten years
earlier-was the only building in the neighbourhood which would
accommodate the panels. Both were completed in situ. The one
is without interest; the other is a fair example of one of his harbour
landscapes with still-life in the foreground. During the same pro
ductive year he carried out a decoration- a large still-life of heraldic
character -for the new de la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill, designed by
Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermeyeff.
The last years of Wadsworth's life-he died in a London nursing
home after some weeks of illness on 21 June 1949-were marked by
no new developments. Although he was able, when occasion re
quired it of him, to expound his aesthetic, 1 this added nothing at all
to doctrines current among artists working in the cubist tradition,
for he was never deeply concerned with ideas. His art therefore rarely
challenged, rarely even disquieted, as art of the most original order
almost invariably challenges or disquiets, and he came to be accepted
more and more as an advanced painter from contact with whom no
harm would be likely to result. His paintings -the verisimilitude of
them, in fact-were the subject of jokes in 'Punch' and other journals
('few can deny that to the sextant-lover Mr. Wadsworth's excellent
painting is second only to the real thing', and so forth) 2 and in 1944,
1 For example/The Abstract Painter's ownExplanationVThe Studio', November
1933, and 'Problems of the Painter, 1935', a discussion between Eric Newton and
himself, 'The Listener', 20 March 1935.
2 'Punch', 13 April 1938.
162 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
without ever having submitted a painting to a Summer Exhibition,
he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.
My own impression of the later Wadsworth-I neither knew him
intimately nor saw him often but it is an impression that persists -
is of a man whose earlier interest in ideas, never a particularly lively
one, had dwindled almost away, and of a man preoccupied to the
exclusion of almost everything else with the technicalities of his art.
Of the many works of his hand which he destroyed, I understand
that in the great majority of cases the faults he found were not in the
conception or the realization of it but in the technique in the narrow
est sense. How otherwise account for his destruction of one of the
finest of the Dunkirk series, of the abstracts, of Still Death, a memor
able still-life with a skull, painted between June and August 1937?
It seems to me that his horror of being survived by a piece of defec
tive workmanship became at times almost obsessive.
This horror, however, was but one manifestation of this most
scrupulous of painter's horror of all imperfection in his own work.
His concern at the discovery that the Tate possessed a picture 1 which
he considered unworthy is expressed in some correspondence which
passed between us in the autumn of 1942.
By the way, [he enquired] what is the Still Life by me to which you
refer? I believe the Contemporary Art Society presented a painting of
mine to the Tate a little time ago and this is no doubt the one. But what
is it? I am very much afraid that it is a little picture of a couple of shells
and a bit of blue ribbon which turned up at a show at the Leicester
Galleries a few years ago -covered with what I can only think was
Coach-Milvers' varnish and looking dreadful. If it is that one it ought
not to be in the Tate at all. It was entirely experimental- pain ted on card
board (of all poor things). What the experiment was I forget now-
possibly something to do with demonstrating Tempera methods to
Pierre Roy. In any case it is annoying and humiliating to be repre
sented in our foremost modern National collection by a work that, in
my opinion, has no merits at all. If I were in your position, in charge
of the Tate, I should secretly destroy it and with great enthusiasm!
In these days of fuel economy it is only fit to contribute to the central-
heating of the Tate! I suppose it would be out of the question to swap
it for another painting. 2
1 Still Life, bequeathed hy Montague Shearman through the Contemporary Art
Society in 1940.
2 6 September.
EDWARD WADSWORTH. Little Western Flower (1928).
Tempera, 2ix 15 in. Coll. Mr. J. E. Barton.
EDWARD WADSWORTH 163
It was eventually decided that the Tate should retain the Still Life,
on the understanding that if deterioration became apparent it should
be returned to the artist for treatment, while accepting as a gift
Bronze Ballet, the picture for which he originally proposed to
exchange it. In another letter in which he recognized this arrange
ment as *in the long run, fairest to all concerned', he added these
illuminating details about Bronze Ballet.
It is painted [he wrote] with yolk of egg (and powder colour) on a
gessoed panel and was painted in April and May 1940 at Maresfield,
Sussex to the somewhat noisy accompaniment, as far as I remember,
of the bombardment of Abbeville, Boulogne and Calais-all mingled
with the call of the cuckoo ! It is one of a series of many paintings done
as a Le Havre series. It is in no sense a topographical view of any
particular scene but all the motifs or design elements are to be found in
that port and the two jetties 'place' it more or less. 1
There was a close-knit, all-of-a-piece consistency about Wads-
worth: he was efficient, industrious, and, in spite of the readiness
with which the thin-lipped smile came to the bronzed saturnine face,
and in spite of his powers of enjoyment of things, there was some
thing a little inhuman about him-yet this was, perhaps, a characteris
tic not unfitting this oddly rare being, a true poet of the age of the
machines.
1 24 October.
STANLEY SPENCER
b. 1891
I CANNOT at all remember what chance first sent me to Stanley
Spencer's studio, but I well remember the visit. The studio was
at the top of the Vale Hotel, a big public house overlooking the
pond in the Vale of Health in Hampstead. The room was barely
large enough to accommodate the immense canvas, measuring some
eighteen feet long by nine feet high, which leaned against the
longest wall. Up against the canvas stood a small table-which, with
two kitchen chairs and a small tin bath, was the room's only furni-
ture-and upon it a large teapot, half a dozen unwashed plates and
some white marmalade jars, some containing paint brushes and
others marmalade.
Stanley Spencer was a tiny figure with a long fringe of dark hair
hanging low over a face of extraordinary earnestness and animation.
The least observant would have been aware of being in the presence
of a person of unusual energy and originality. After the minimum
of preliminaries he began to speak with the utmost candour of what
most deeply concerned him.
Sometimes the process of getting to know a person is the process,
so minutely described by Proust, of stripping layer after layer of
deceptive appearance and discerning at last the unexpected and
irreducible core of personality.
During the years following that first visit I have had day-long and
night-long talks with Stanley Spencer about aspects of his painting,
but he has never said anything so illuminating of the innermost
springs of his creation as what were almost his first words. At that
time he had held no exhibition, and, so far as I am aware, little or
nothing had been written about him, but I had the good fortune to
know two of his finest paintings Zacharias and Elizabeth, 1 of 1912-13
(Plate 15), which I had seen in Sir Muirhead Bone's house near
Oxford, and his Self-Portrait, 2 of 1913 (Plate 16), in the flat of
1 Coll. Lady Bone.
2 The Tate Gallery, London.
164
STANLEY SPENCER 165
Sir Edward Marsh in Gray's Inn. When I spoke of my admiration
for these he said:
Those pictures have something that I have lost. When I left the Slade and
went back to Cookham I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything
seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My ideas were beginning to
unfold in fine order when along comes the war and smashes everything.
When I came home the divine sequence had gone. I just opened a shutter
in my side and out rushed my pictures anyhow. Nothing was ever the
same again.
I spoke of the beauty of the glimpse of the river in the top left corner
J of the big canvas against the wall- one of a few meticulously finished
islets in a wide sea of white priming ; 'sometimes/ he said, 'I get a plain
glimpse of that earthly paradise, but it's only a fragmentary glimpse'.
These words of his were in no sense a personal confidence; they were
repeated in one form and another at that time, I suppose, to anybody
with whom he engaged in serious conversation; they give a luminous
insight into a spiritual predicament that has not ceased to harrow and
to drive him. This first great Resurrection* he told me, was under
taken in 1923 and, to judge from the fact that it was scarcely begun,
this visit of mine took place probably towards the end of that year.
When he meets people he is prepared to treat them as friends, and
he so treated me from my first visit, on which indeed he gave me
the splendid pen drawing of himself which he made in preparation
for the Tate Self-Portrait.
During the years following I saw him on other occasions. I recall,
in particular, a later visit made in the spring of 1926, when The
Resurrection was almost complete. Shareen, the Spencers' first child,
had been born in November 1925. Mrs. Spencer was bathing
Shareen, and I had a momentary distraction from her husband's
conversation by my impression that the water was too hot. Shareen
yelled, but appeared to suffer no harm. I remember, too, that a boil
ing kettle which stood upon a small iron stove filled the room with
steam, which condensed and streamed down the spacious surface
of the canvas. A quarter of a century later when certain of the greens
showed a tendency to liquefy I invited the artist to come to the Tate
to examine the picture. He was as puzzled as I about the cause of
this liquefaction until we recalled the baleful perpetually steaming
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
166 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
kettle, which, he became persuaded, was the cause of the instability
of areas of the paint.
The great canvas, which I had first seen blank except for a few
minutely finished islets, and-at longish intervals -seen fill gradually
with figures resurrecting among gravestones and tombs and become
suffused with simple, potent, highly personal poetry, moved me so
much that I wrote an article on Stanley Spencer. This was accepted
by 'Apollo' but remained unpublished. The following year the gift
of The Resurrection to the Tate Gallery by Sir Joseph, afterwards
Lord, Duveen made the picture a focus of widespread controversy.
It was violently attacked and warmly praised. Stanley Spencer
became a public figure -and my immature pages of eulogy became
'news' and were promptly published. 1
A friendship had begun to grow up between us when in the spring
of 1927 he went to live at Burghclere, near Newbury, to carry out
wall paintings in the war memorial chapel specially built to house
them by Lionel Pearson. I will speak of these extraordinary paintings
in the appropriate place, but I would like to name at once the patrons
whose vision and generosity enabled this great project to be realized:
Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Behrend. The work occupied four years. In the late
summer of the same year I emigrated to America.
It was not until twelve years later that I came to know him well.
In the intervening years we met from time to time, and I was
responsible for the acquisition, in 1933, of his Separating Fighting
Swans, of the same year, by the Leeds City Art Gallery, the first
example of his work, I fancy, to go into a public art collection out
side London. But in the early autumn of 1938 my wife and I gave a
party at our house on Primrose Hill to which Stanley Spencer came.
There were difficulties about his catching the last train to Cookham.
He stayed the night. Next day a toothbrush was bought, and he
remained with us all that autumn. In the evenings, returning from
the Tate Gallery, I used to find him, in the half-light of the drawing-
room, curled up on the floor like a twig. He showed no impulse to
draw or paint, but seemed content to live quietly, to meet our
friends and above all to talk. On the first evening he was sitting on a
small couch between my wife, who spoke of his Zacharias and
Elizabeth, and Sir Kenneth Clark, to whom he said 'It is astonishing
1 April 1927.
STANLEY SPENCER 167
that an American should see most into my mind and painting', and
thereafter he used to talk to her with a particular candour. He was
prepared to talk, often at prodigious length, upon any topic, but
upon the slightest pretext he would revert to two, which are closely
interwoven: his early life in Cookham and the subjects of his
paintings.
From these conversations we learnt many things about Stanley
Spencer, many comic and tragic things, but by far the most im
portant and the most relevant to this study was a deeper insight into
what he said to me on my first visit about his earthly paradise and
the smashing of it by the war.
In Cookham, the Berkshire village where Stanley Spencer was
born,
he saw Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. The church
yard [wrote my wife] would surely be the scene of the final resurrection
of man; the river was radiant and serene like the heavenly Jordan,
though there was something of the Styx about it too. In the streets when
he saw his father, bearded, and venerable, it might have been St. Peter
walking there, or one of the Prophets. 1
He was born on 30 June 1891, the seventh son among the nine
children of William Spencer, a music teacher and organist, and
Annie, born Slacke, his wife. Earlier, generations of the family had
been in the building trade.
Most men and women experience moments of exaltation in the
contemplation of a May morning, or the starlit heavens, in perform
ing a heroic act, most often and most intensely in romantic love- but
these moments are rarely prolonged. To certain men and women is
given the capacity for sustained exaltation-a capacity, I am inclined
to think, that is a sign of superior nature, just as the capacity for
boredom may be that of inferior. And one of the signs by which the
artist of exceptional creative power may sometimes be recognized
is the capacity for prolonged exaltation over things that to others are
entirely commonplace.
From the time when he grew into a sentient being until the First
World War Stanley Spencer experienced exaltation in regard to his
native village. To the dispassionate traveller's eye Cookham is a
1 'Stanley Spencer*, by Elizabeth Rothenstein (Phaidon British Artists), 1945,
p. 6.
168 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
delightful village, but with no more beauty or character than five
hundred others scattered up and down the country; but Stanley
Spencer's upbringing was one that gave particular opportunity for
the growth in him of a deep and enduring sentiment of locality. His
father was a man of high character and patriarchal appearance, who
if at heart something of an agnostic had a passionate love for the
Bible. 'In the evenings, with his children gathered round him,'
Stanley Spencer told my wife, c he read to them from the Old
Testament with such conviction that he made it as real to them as
Cookham itself, and indeed it seemed as if the story of the Bible had
been enacted in their own familiar streets.' 1 A vague sense of the
events* related in the Bible having taken place in the region where
he was born early took a hold upon Stanley Spencer's imagination
and attaches him to the tradition in which Milton, and more mili-
tantly Blake, were sharers, according to which the British Isles were
the centre of all primitive and patriarchal goodness. 'Jerusalem the
Emanation of the Giant Albion! Can it be? Is it a truth that the
Learned have explored? Was Britain the Primitive Seat of the
Patriarchal Religion?' asked Blake in his 'Jerusalem'. There are no
grounds for supposing that in Stanley Spencer's mind there is any
thing approaching an explicit historical identification of these Islands
with the Garden of Eden, but he has been altogether free from the
widely current heresy that the Christian religion is something which
belongs irrevocably to the past. Indeed it is one of the most pro
nounced features of Stanley Spencer's mind that past and present, the
living and the dead, good and evil all exist together in a vast un-
differentiated flux. There is nothing either analytic or sceptical: he
is deeply conscious of the continuity of things, and might say that
what Blake said of Mr. B. applies equally to Mr. S. 'Mr. B./ wrote
Blake, 'has done as all the ancients did, and as all the moderns who
are worthy of fame, given the historical fact in its poetical vigour so
as it always happens, and not in the dull way that some Historians
pretend who, being weakly organized themselves, cannot see either
miracle or prodigy.' Whether because of the benign atmosphere of
their churchyard or from some other cause it would seem that to
Cookham people the dead who lie there have not gone very far
from their homes. My wife recalls Stanley Spencer's delight at
1 Op. cit., p. 5.
HA
15. STANLEY SPENCER, Ztcharias ani EHzakefa (1912-13).
Oil, 60 X 60 in. Coll. Lady Bone.
STANLEY SPENCER l6p
hearing a lady of Cookham call over the fence to her neighbour,
Tin just going across to the churchyard to give mother a clip round/
He, who has always remained very much of a village boy, shares this
sense of the nearness of the dead, and it is apparent in all his Resur
rections.
Stanley Spencer's exaltation at the beauty of the life surround
ing him was heightened by his father's love of music. The three
eldest sons were also musicians, and with their father they made
up a family quartet. When with his brother Gilbert, afterwards the
painter, he was put to bed, they could hear, he told my wife, coming
to them from the room below, the strains of music, such music as
they would never forget. He told, too, how one Sunday, Will, his
eldest brother, took him to the church and played for him on the
organ Bach's 'St. Anne Prelude and Fugue', and how, when the last
tremendous echoes had died, Will had asked him, 'What did it sound
like to you?' 'Like angels shrieking with joy,' Stanley answered, and
recalled the pleasure that this answer gave. Both my wife and I have
listened for many hours to his talk of his early life in Cookham,
walking with him sometimes along its lanes and beside its poetic
reach of the Thames, but the essence of what he told us is conveyed
in a letter he wrote from Salonika in 1917 for Eric Gill's magazine
'The Game'. Acute homesickness and the limits of space gave this
poignant and evocative letter an intensity and a succinctness not
paralleled-at any rate in my experience-in either his vivid talk or
in his other writings. The following selections, made by my wife,
are a microcosm of his early Cookham life, more particularly of the
two years between his departure from the Slade in 1912 and the
beginning of the First World War.
I remember how happy I felt when one afternoon I went up to Mrs.
Shergold's and drew her little girl. After I had finished I went into the
kitchen which was just such another as our own (only their kitchen
table and chairs are thicker and whiter) with Mrs. Shergold and Cecily.
I nearly ran home after that visit. I felt I could paint a picture and that
feeling quickened my steps. This visit made me happy because it
induced me to produce something which would make me walk with
God. 'And Enoch walked with God and was not.' To return to the
dining room, I remained looking out of the big window at the yew
tree, and then turning to Sydney ask him to play some of the Preludes.
He does so, though haltingly, yet with true understanding. And now
I7O MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
for 2 or 3 hours of meditation. I go upstairs to my room and sit down
at the table by the window and think about the resurrection, then I get
my big bible out and read the book of Tobit: the gentle evening breeze
coming through the open window slightly lifts the heavy pages. I will
go out for a walk through Cookham churchyard, I will walk along the
path which runs under the hedge. I do so and pause to look at a tomb
stone which rises out of the midst of a small privet hedge which grows
over the grave and is railed around with iron railings. I return to our
house and put it down on paper. I go to supper not over satisfied with
the evenings thought, but know that tomorrow will see the light,
tomorrow 'in my flesh shall I see God* . . . after two or three hours'
reading I blow out the candle, and whisper a word to myself 'To
morrow' I say and fall asleep I do not remember the exact moment
of waking up any more than I know when sleep comes. But although
the moment of waking is not known, yet the moment when you
become aware that it is morning, when you say 'it's morning', is the
most wide awake moment of the day. How everything seems fresh and
to belong definitely to the morning. ... I go and call Gil in the little
bedroom. I go downstairs . . . and out into the street and call a friend;
we all go down to Odney Weir for a bathe and swim. I feel fresh awake
and alive; this is the time for visitations I swim right in the pathway
of sunlight; I go home thinking of the beautiful wholeness of the day.
During the morning I am visited and walk about in that visitation.
How at this time everything seems more definite and to put on a new
meaning and freshness you never noticed. In the afternoon I set out my
work and begin the picture. I leave off at dusk feeling delighted with
the spiritual work I have done. 1
Stanley Spencer was connected with the place of his birth by ties
more intimate and numerous than is usually the case in a population
which ever since its vast uprooting by the Industrial Revolution has,
through necessity or disposition, become increasingly inclined to
move and increasingly forgetful of local ties. The Spencer family
seems to have been long established in Cookham. Stanley's grand
father, he once told me, began as a bricklayer and showed sufficient
enterprise to enable him to set up as a builder on his own account,
and he built several of the kilns which, many years later, were repre
sented with exceptional sympathy in the paintings of his two grand
sons. He had a passion for astronomy, and the little local singing club
that he founded long survived him. It was from him that his son
William, and two grandsons, inherited their musical talents. The
1 Op. cit., pp. 9, 10.
STANLEY SPENCER
two grandsons became musicians of note. Stanley Spencer's maternal
grandfather, a man named Slacke, who came from the Isle of Wight,
was the foreman in a small boot factory and he owned a grocer's
shop. The Spencers conformed to the rites of the Established Church,
the Slackes were active Wesleyans, and Stanley is very much aware
of the dual nature of his religious inheritance. I have often heard him
speak of a projected Resurrection in which the people would ascend
the Hill of Zion in two great streams, the Anglican and the Chapel,
the last with their red-brick and tin-roofed bethels in the background.
As a child he went sometimes to the parish church, at others to the
Wesleyan chapel. His early education could not have been more
local. In a tiny cottage adjoining the garden of Fernlea, the house
where he was born and passed all his early life, was a school in which
first a Miss George and later Annie, his eldest sister, taught a small
class of local children. There he was able to learn almost nothing.
Eventually in despair Annie told him to write his entire life in a
notebook and to show it to his father, who glanced at it with
resignation, and threw it aside.
The place that epitomized 'the lovely holy feeling' which per
vaded all his early life was not Fernlea his home, happy though its
associations were, but the churchyard, 'the holy suburb of Heaven',
where his grandparents were buried. It was here that he and his
brothers played their principal games; it was here that his footsteps
turned in times of loneliness and grief, and it was here that his first
serious drawings were made.
Even attendance at the Slade School, from 1908 until 1912, did not
shift his centre of gravity away from Cookham. Like Constable a
little more than a century before, Stanley Spencer went to school
in London simply to find technique to express a way of seeing
already, in its essential character, in being. The sociable, interested
village boy, after a period when he was the victim of bullies, en
joyed the companionship of fellow students and his heightened
proficiency; he gained a distant acquaintance, just perceptible in one
or two early works, with Cubism, and, more important, he came to
know the work of certain Italian primitives. On one ocasion, an
exciting one both for himself and his brother Gilbert, he brought
home from the Slade a reproduction of a Masaccio-T/ze Tribute
Money, I think. But these experiences, vivifying as they were, were
172 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
peripheral. Compared with Cookham, where his heart and mind
had their being, London and the Slade were 'like ships that pass in
the night'. When his last afternoon class at the Slade was finished,
'Cookham', as Stanley Spencer was called by his fellow students, used
to go straight to Paddington, where he sat on the platform waiting
for the first train to his Celestial City.
His Celestial City it has remained. On my own most recent visit
to him at Cliveden View, the tiny cottage on the fringe of Cookham
which he has occupied since 1945, the most recent of many visits,
we had some matters of consequence to discuss in connexion with a
forthcoming retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tate. We
had not talked for more than a few minutes when with an appealing
look he said, 'Come on, let's go into the village/ And away we went
into the churchyard, deciphered inscriptions on the tombstones, and
so into the church, to look at the pew, the fourth back in the left
aisle, facing the organ, where he used to sit with his family, and to
examine faded photographs of Victorian vicars. In 1954 Stanley
Spencer visited China. As the omnibus carried him from London
to the airport he pointed with his small brown-paper parcel-his
only luggage-along the Great West Road and said to a companion:
'That's the way I go to Cookham.' In China itself Chou En-Lai gave
an address on the New China and at its conclusion silence fell on
the party. The silence was broken by Stanley Spencer's voice. 'Yes,'
he said, 'we ought to know the New China better. And the New
China ought to know Cookham better. I feel at home in China,
because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near, only just round
the corner.'
Those who show themselves friends to artists in their years of
need and obscurity are rarer than might be supposed. It should
therefore be mentioned that a neighbour, Lady Boston, wife of a
generous patron of his father's, not only herself taught Stanley
Spencer the elements of drawing, but paid for his first two years at
the Slade, after which he won a scholarship which enabled him to
remain for two further years.
The time between departure from the Slade in 1912 and his
enlistment three years later in the Royal Army Medical Corps was
beyond comparison the most intensely creative time of his life.
During those three years he made a number of paintings and
i<5. STANLEY SPENCER. Self-Portrait (1913).
Oil, 23f x 20 in. The Tate Gallery, London.
STANLEY SPENCER 173
drawings which, although of varying quality, manifest an exalted
spirituality rarely found outside the great periods of religious art.
This extraordinary group of works did not come into being quite
unheralded. While still a Slade student he painted Two Girls and a
Beehive 1 - in 1910, John Donne arriving in Heaven* in 1911 -in which,
virtually alone in this artist's works, there is a suggestion, in the
massive, generalized character of the figures, that he has looked with
attention at contemporary continental painting, in this case, that of
the Cubists-and The Nativity* in 1912. As the qualities which make
them notable are still more impressively present in the chief works
among the later group, I will say no more than that they are astonish
ing productions for a student.
Not all the pictures in the later group represent explicitly religious
subjects, but they do all manifest the vision of a man living in an
earthly paradise, in which all things, whether trees, buildings or
people, are holy and God's presence is mysteriously manifest. A
number, and among these the finest, represent events related or fore
told in the Old Testament and the Gospels: the Apple Gatherers*
of 1912-13, Swan Upping? begun the next year, and even Mending
Cowls- Cookham, of 1914, in which at first glance the human figures,
or the people, as the artist prefers to call them, seem to take a sub
ordinate place, are the works of a man to whom his surroundings
are sacred. When he represents religious subjects Stanley Spencer is
perceived to be a God-centred man, a man for whom God, the Holy
Family, the Saints and Prophets are even more real than the streets
and fields of Cookham, and the sacredness of Cookham is perceived
to derive from his imagining this place to be the theatre of their acts.
There was never any question of this artist's having put them into
contemporary costume to make them more convincing. He has
always represented what he has known. He knew Cookham and its
people. The world beyond its fields was a shadowy place and the
people strangers. The idea of situating God and his Mother, his Son
and his Saints elsewhere or of clothing them in the clothes of
strangers is one he would not have entertained. (Not that their
clothes are insistently contemporary. In The Visitation* of 1913,
1 Coll. Mrs. Sydney Schiff. 2 Coll. Mrs. Gwen Raverat.
3 The Slade School, University College, London. 4 The Tate Gallery, London.
5 Coll Mr. J. L. Behrend. 6 Coll. Mr. James Wood.
174 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Our Lady, a shy awkward village girl, wears a freshly-laundered
dress; in Joachim among the Shepherds, 1 of 1912, and Zacharias and
Elizabeth, of 1912-13, the clothes have a timeless character.)
Besides the three just mentioned, the other principal religious
paintings belonging to these years of single-minded creativity are
The Centurions Servant* of 1914-15, and The Resurrection of Good
and Bad* of 1913 , the first versions of a theme that has a stronger and
more tenacious hold upon his imagination than any other. Of all
these beyond comparison the most exalted, in my opinion, is
Zacharias and Elizabeth. In this picture is expressed in terms that are
at the same time local and universal, and with a wonderful radiant
gravity, the story of how an angel of the Lord appeared to a certain
priest named Zacharias as he was sacrificing in the temple. Zacharias,
seeing the Angel standing on the right side of the altar, was troubled,
and the Angel said to him, 'Fear not, Zacharias, for thy prayer is
heard; and thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt
call his name John/ We cannot see the Angel himself, only the bright
light of his presence on the far side of the altar, but we can see the
blameless priest, his troubled face as he asks, 'Whereby shall I know
this? for I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years/ And
we can see Elizabeth, her face lit by the brightness of the unseen
Angel, and the look of intense stillness that it wears.
The story is familiar enough, but Stanley Spencer has not relied
upon our knowledge of more than the barest facts. The exalted
character of the scene he has constructed compels us to recognize, as
though the story were new to us, the momentousness of the an
nouncement that the elderly wife of an elderly clergyman is to give
birth to a first child. Each of the figures has a dignity that is inherent
and owes nothing to any conventional posture, a serenity remote
from relaxation. And the figures are related by a simple, closely knit
design, of which the spine, so to speak, is the all but symbolic wall
of the temple. Perhaps the noblest feature of this work is the face of
Elizabeth, so manifestly alive, so intently waiting, yet so still as to fill
the whole picture with its stillness. Certain anonymous critics of the
1 Coll. Mr. J. L. Behrend; there is an elaborately finished pen and wash sketch
for the whole composition in the Tate Gallery.
2 Coll. Mr. Henry Lamb, R.A. This picture is often called The Bed Picture.
3 Colls, the Executors of the late Sir "William Rothenstein and Mr. James Wood.
STANLEY SPENCER 175
first volume of these studies, incensed by my calling in question the
commonplace of criticism that an immeasurable gulf still separates
the painting of England from that of France, attempted to associate
the attitude that prompted this questioning with chauvinism, with
parochialism, and with a number of absurd ideas that I have never
either defended or presupposed. I will now, however, give these
critics an authentic target by offering the opinion that, provided
account is taken of the weakness of both the artistic and the religious
traditions of the twentieth century compared with the thirteenth,
this little picture may be compared without absurdity to a work by
Giotto, so astonishingly has Stanley Spencer here (and very occasion
ally elsewhere) transcended, as a religious painter, the standards of
his age. Although smaller and slighter, Joachim among the Shepherds,
has something of the same character. The Resurrection of Good and
Bad, a diptych showing in one panel the good who rise serenely
from flowers and grass, and in the other the earthbound bad who
look despairingly out from jaws of turf from which they struggle
with difficulty to free themselves, are grim pictures in which
the artist shows himself a highly original painter, but he has envis
aged his subject in traditional terms. The paintings were planned
with the idea that they might be placed above the chancel arch in
Cookham Church. 1 But as the Resurrection motive took hold of his
imagination with an almost obsessional intensity his conception
of it-without ever losing its traditional meaning-has widened: a
few figures have become a host; a graveyard has become an all-
embracing panorama; and the distinction between good and bad has
disappeared.
When the First World War began and shattered his mood of
exaltation he was painting Swan Upping and had completed the
lower two-thirds of it. In 1915 he joined the Royal Army Medical
Corps, and was sent to Salonika the following year. During his two
years of service in Macedonia, a country so entirely unlike his own,
his capacity for forming deep attachments for places brought him a
strange and fruitful experience. When he first went to Macedonia he
used to lie awake at nights thinking about Cookham, in particular
about his abandoned landscape Swan Upping and of his plans for its
completion. One day in 1917, when marching, he told my wife,
1 Note on the picture in the Tate Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue.
176 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
they came upon a place in the hills, the mysterious quality of which
struck him so forcibly that it, too, came to haunt him at nights so
that he found it impossible to sleep. By day he used to look back,
longing to return. Apart from going home, to go there was the one
thing he desired. Hearing that his own county regiment, the Royal
Berkshires, were stationed there, he applied for transfer to this com
batant force so that he might go back to this place in the hills.
Darkness was falling when he came to the place again, and he hardly
dared look at it for fear the strange vision that had haunted him was
some trick of memory, but the mystery was indeed there, even
stranger and more significant in the dying light. He lay down and
slept, he said, as if he had reached a haven. From the emotion stirred
in him by this valley in the Macedonian hills -a kind of com
pensation for his love of home-sprang the most ambitious of Stan
ley Spencer's works, the work by which his stature may most
accurately be measured. Although he stored away in his capacious
memory every contour and shadow of it, and its sombre colouring,
the time for its translation into a picture, or more strictly a series of
pictures, lay some years ahead.
In 1919 in December he returned to England, and went straight to
Fernlea, his parents' house, and up the stairs to his bedroom where
he found Swan Upping leaning against a wall just where he had left
it more than three years before. He completed it without hesitation.
The war shocked him to the depths of his being and impaired his
imagination, but it did not affect its extraordinary continuity. I know
of no artist of any age whose imagination is more consistent. The
fruits of it are garnered in a long series of big, cheap notebooks,
manufactured for some commercial purpose. These he fills with
drawings for innumerable projects, any one of which- even one
belonging to his earliest years as an artist-he can take up and carry
out unaltered. He is a generous man, without a strong sense of
possession, but I have never known him to part otherwise than with
grief from any of these projects, however slight. They are simple,
almost childish-looking drawings, these studies of the people of his
imagination, but they are less simple than they seem, for he is able
to adumbrate a large and complicated composition upon a series of
small sheets of paper so that when eventually they are put together
everything is precisely where he intends and the same scale preserved
STANLEY SPENCER 177
throughout. Nor is it an easy feat to design with such precision
upon a single surface, let alone upon a multitude of small ones,
in a painting room so small that they cannot be assembled. The
drawings he makes of the people seen by his outward eye, on the
other hand, are obviously most accomplished. These he draws fast,
with entire sureness, beginning at some arbitrarily chosen point
and completing, usually, each feature before passing to the next. I
remember seeing shortly after he had begun it a drawing of myself
in 1951; and there, quite alone in the middle of an otherwise virgin
sheet of paper, was a minutely finished eye. His ability to plan large
and complicated compositions upon small sheets of paper and to
begin a portrait with a minutely delineated eye springs from his
power to envisage the completed work continuously and exactly.
He employs the method he considers best suited for a given under
taking and he who has theories about most things has few, I fancy,
about technical procedures. His attitude towards these is illustrated
by his reply to Cecil Collins, who objected to his use of linseed oil
as a medium on the grounds that the paint would come off. It won't
come off/ he said; 'if you kiss a whore with love you won't get the
pox, and if you put on your paint with love it won't come off.'
Nobody who knows Stanley Spencer can be unaware of the effects
upon his personality and his art of the First World War. They have
been considered by those who have written on him, and I have
already quoted his own statement that just as all his ideas were un
folding the war came, and when it ended the divine sequence had
gone. (I recall his speaking, in a moment of despair, of suing the
War Office for the destruction of his peace of mind and of his
talents.)
That his work lost certain of the qualities for which it is most to
be valued and that it showed other and unexpected qualities in the
years immediately following the end of the First World War is
beyond question. But unlike other writers and unlike the artist him
self I am inclined to question the conclusion that it was the war
which brought about this radical change. Wars are more apt to
hasten changes already in process and to reveal developments which
might otherwise remain hidden for a time rather than to bring about
developments entirely unforeseen. The war carried Stanley Spencer
away from his Celestial City; it broke the holy spell; it interrupted
iy8 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the rhythm of inspired and concentrated work; it subjected him
to agonizing experiences; but I do not believe that these ordeals,
shattering though of course they were, were sufficient to modify a
vision of such serene power. It seems to me that by uprooting, shak
ing and hurting, the finely adjusted creative faculties of the artist they
weakened his resistance to inevitable changes. But the change that
largely transformed the character of his art would have taken place,
I believe, perhaps indeed later, but inevitably none the less. Making
the fullest allowance for the effects of the war, his art seems to me to
owe its transformation not to them but to a widening of the range
of his vital preoccupations, to which no doubt it contributed, but
which belonged, quite simply, to the process of growth or of
exposure to some current ideas. During his early life, most parti
cularly during the period closed by his involvement in the war,
Stanley Spencer was a God-centred boy. He was aware of little
beyond his family- which by an easy process of assimilation included
the inhabitants of Cookham-and the beloved place in which he had
been born. And he was intensely aware of the luminously presiding
presence of God, upon whom his deepest thinking and his deepest
imaginings were focused. In representing 'the holy suburb of
Heaven' he was praising his Creator. Then came the war and its
uprooting, and in 1925 marriage, which contributed far more, I
think, than war to the transformation of his personality. Marriage,
in fact, was a cardinal event in his life as an artist, for this most
intimate of human relations had the effect of inspiring in him an
absorbed preoccupation not with his wife alone, but through her
with the human beings he came to know. There followed pre
occupation with evil as well as good, with ugliness as well as beauty,
and with sensual love as well as the love of God. The change was
radical, and as it took effect the emphasis of his art was no longer
upon the Creator but upon the created; there came, in fact, to be less
and less emphasis of any kind, as it grew more and more compre
hensive. Of the encumbering effects of such baggage Stanley Spencer
is very much aware.
You can't include all that without its taking away from your vision of
God; but once you have all that baggage you can't just throw it away.
It belongs to you and you've got to bring it with you. After I married
Hilda and my work began to include so much besides the divine vision,
STANLEY SPENCER 179
I've been incapable of painting a religious picture, religious in the sense
ofZacharias and some of my early pictures. The fact that many of them
are of religious subjects makes no differ ence. I no longer have a clear
vision of God; I'm somehow involved in the created. Sometimes I feel
I were showing his creations to God. Take an Edwardian old lady.
Five feet high. Bloated. Purple dress. Ridiculous little feet pinched in
ridiculous little shoes. I feel that in my painting I'm lifting her up,
saying to God 'Look! Isn't she bloody wonderful?'
The change came about gradually. So far as I am aware Stanley
Spencer has never had an important experience that has not been
reflected in his work, and it was inevitable that the war, with the
loneliness, the warm, unsentimental companionship, the unfamiliar
scenes and the intermittent threat of extinction that it brought, should
demand imperatively to be expressed. As soon as he was back in
Cookham he completed Swan Upping, and resumed his series of
religious subjects with The Last Supper, 1 and Christ Carrying the
Cross, 2 both of 1920, The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon, 3 of 1921,
and The Betrayal, 4 " of 1923 . Had he not painted Zacharias and Elizabeth
I would regard these -more particularly Christ Carrying the Cross and
The Betrayal-zs among the finest religious pictures of the age. But
compared with, the passionate, luminously direct response that
inspired the earlier pictures the later seem to be the products of
artifice. 5 They lack the mysterious power to move us, but we
cannot withhold our admiration for the extraordinary dramatic
power that the artist has brought to bear in order to bring home to
us the momentousness of the events he has represented. These later
works have a calculated eloquence that makes them seem almost
Baroque beside the primitive simplicity of the earlier. The early
Italian and Flemish masters have been, usually in reproduction, his
constant companions, but the cloaked Christ of The Betrayal suggests
1 Coll. Mr. J. L. Behrend. 2 The Tate Gallery, London.
3 The Tate Gallery, London. 4 The City Art Gallery, Belfast.
5 The idea for Christ Carrying the Cross, according to information supplied by
the artist, was first suggested by a newspaper report of Queen Victoria's funeral -
'ladies were weeping openly and strong men broke down in the side streets'. In
the foreground is the Virgin. The house is the artist's in Cookham and the ivy-
covered cottage is his grandmother's. The onlookers are loafers, some indifferent,
some aware of the significance of the event. The window-cleaners are delighted
to see someone else 'doing a bit of carrying*. The feeling was one of joy-* and all
the common everyday occurrences in the village were re-assuring, comforting
occurrences of that joy'.
180 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
at least a passing glance at El Greco. I know of no contemporary
work in which buildings are used with such effect to enforce our
sense of awe as they are in this: the menacing roofs against a lowering
sky; the abrupt reminder, in the form of a corrugated iron wall, that
what is taking place is not a dream but something that concerns us
here and now. At the same time he produced a number of the almost
purely retinal landscapes, of Durweston, Petersfield, or wherever
he happened to be, that have occupied him intermittently through
out his life. The contrast between the pedestrian efficiency of many
of these and the vaulting imagination manifest in his religious
pictures has often been remarked with surprise. Religious pictures,
in particular very large religious pictures (indeed large pictures of
any kind), are extremely expensive undertakings. Stanley Spencer
has no source of income except painting and he could not survive,
let alone paint huge Resurrections, unless he painted saleable land
scapes. These landscapes vary greatly in quality between such
beautiful works as, for instance, The Harrow, Durweston?- of 1920,
May Tree, Cookham? of 1932, Cedar Tree, Cookham* of 1935,
Gardens in the Pound, Cookham,* and View from Cookham Bridge, 5
both of 1936, and some very dry mechanical performances indeed.
It is a mistake, however, to dismiss the landscapes, even the more
pedestrian, as a manual equivalent of colour photography under
taken with an eye to immediate sale, for they serve at least three
other purposes. They give him hours of respite from the fearful
effort involved in the production of large pictures, packed with
incident and deeply felt; they refresh his vision by constantly renew
ing his intimate contacts with nature; and they charge his fabulous
memory.
During the years following his return home from Macedonia the
painting of the group of religious pictures, The Betrayal and the
others of which I spoke just now, and still more the landscapes, were
inadequate to express the grand conception that was taking shape in
his mind. This was the expression, in a series of related pictures, of
his experience of the war, culminating in a Resurrection far larger
and more complex than anything he had attempted. This he
1 Coll. Mr. J. L. Behrend. 2 Coll. The Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.
3 Coll. Major E. Beddington Behrens. 4 The City Art Gallery, Leeds.
5 Coll. Mr. Victor Gollancz.
STANLEY SPENCER l8l
conceived as a series of paintings designed to embellish a chapel. As
there seemed to be no prospect of its being realized he used to call it
'the chapel in the air'. During a stay in 1922 with his friend Henry
Lamb, the painter, at Poole in Dorset, the project assumed, in the
course of two weeks, the form of a big cartoon, in pencil and ink,
of the two side walls of a chapel, each divided into four panels in
turn divided into two and surmounted by continuous friezes. There
came to see Henry Lamb two friends of his, Mr. and Mrs. J. L.
Behrend, who had already shown an interest in Stanley Spencer by
buying Swan Upping. Mrs. Behrend's brother had been killed in the
war, and they were considering the erection of a memorial of some
kind to his memory. The cartoons were standing face to the wall;
the visitors looked at them, admired them and afterwards made an
offer to commission him to carry them out. 'Not good enough'
was his reply. ('Our offer wasnt good enough,' Mrs. Behrend said
to me years afterwards.) It was revised, renewed and accepted. On
my first visit to Vale Studio the following year I saw a number of
larger studies for the same project, together with one for the missing
end wall. This was a Resurrection set in Kalinova, the gloomy
Macedonian valley that had so irresistibly drawn him to return there.
Nothing so convincingly illustrates the prodigality of Stanley
Spencer's imagination or his unremitting industry as the fact that,
having obtained a commission which would enable him to give
expression to his most grandiose conceptions, he immediately began
the Tate Resurrection, by far the biggest picture he had attempted.
Few who saw it were aware that this immense picture was a side
show. It occupies in the succession of Stanley Spencer's works rather
the position of The Painter's Studio in that of Courbet's: an immense
repertory of everything that had gone before. There was Cookham
churchyard depicted on a great scale yet with a wealth of detail:
'the holy suburb of Heaven' densely populated with figures rising
from their tombs, the artist himself among them. A lyrical glimpse
of the Thames and its park-like banks summarizes the country round
about. There is one innovation: the presence in the shadow of the
church porch of the first two Persons of the Trinity. Into this great
canvas the artist has poured the abundance of his loving knowledge
of this place which means more to him than any other; of this place
which he loves not in a general way but inch by inch of stone,
1 82 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
plaster, brick, railing, tile, foliage, flower and grass, as though he had
made it all himself. With Stanley Spencer it is always the people
and the place that are known and loved, never the paint, and he
paints them, for all his love, a little severely. Never, like Renoir or
Gainsborough, does he caress them into being, and his harsh, brisk
treatment of paint often makes his work repellent to other painters.
It is as though he sees the people and places of his pictures so com
pletely in his mind's eye, with such sharp, final definition, that all he
requires is to transfer them, without modification and without
embellishment, to his canvas. It is always they rather than their
painted images who are the real subjects of his pictures. Although
the Tate Resurrection is a summing-up of the artist's past achievement,
it has one characteristic that marks it as belonging to the later period
of his growth when his art had lost its God-centred simplicity and
become comprehensive. This picture is full of beauties, full even of
splendours. It seems to me to be one of the great pictures of this
century. Yet, in comparison with the best of the artist's earlier works,
it is over-crowded, loose in composition, imperfectly focused.
In comparing the Resurrection which forms part of the memorial
commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Behrend, which was not begun
until 1927, with the Tate picture, which was completed early the
same year, it should be borne in mind that in certain respects the
picture carried out last was the first conceived, and is therefore
nearer in spirit to the earlier works. This memorial, which is situated
in the Berkshire village of Burghclere, consists of two ranges of
almshouses flanking the Oratory of All Souls, the interior of which
was designed to meet the requirements of the artist. The buildings
were completed in 1927. From that year until his paintings were
completed in 1931, the artist lived with his wife and two children
at a nearby cottage. He completed the work without assistance.
When he was enabled to begin work in the oratory eight years
had passed since he had made his first drawings, and five since the *
working drawings of the side walls had been completed. His
experience of the war was too overwhelming to be expressed in the
works he did upon an ordinary scale, admirable as certain of them
were, in particular Travoys arriving with Wounded at a Dressing station,
Smol, Macedonia, 1 of 1919. It began to crystallize about the Kalinova
1 The Imperial War Museum, London.
STANLEY SPENCER 183
valley when he first saw it, and after ten years' meditation it expressed
itself in a prolonged outburst of spiritual energy. The side walls of the
oratory are scenes of military life: soldiers checking laundry, scrub
bing floors; the arrival of wounded in hospital; wounded pointing
out their kit-bags to orderlies, and such-like. The artist has made us
aware that these scenes are not mere records made by a detached
observer, but records of his own intensely felt experience, shared
equally by a crowd of other young men of his own age. There is in
fact nothing peculiar, still less eccentric, about the experiences
recorded; they are the common experience of soldiers. The soldiers
are shown doing almost everything that soldiers do except fighting.
So positive is his horror of violence that it would be unnatural in
him to represent it; but fighting occupies a smaller part of the time
of fewer soldiers than civilians suppose. The irregularly shaped
friezes above the series of panels are filled by two panoramic scenes,
one of them the great tented camp at Kalinova at night. The
culmination, not only of the paintings at Burghclere but, I believe,
of the artist's life work, is the painting on the end wall of the
oratory, behind the altar, The Resurrection of Soldiers (Plate 17).
Here [I quote my wife's description of it] he has painted the awakened
soldiers holding their crosses. At first they only handle them, exploring
them unknowingly. He shows the growth of understanding in all its
various stages until at last in die full light of revelation the soldiers know
that in suffering and death they have triumphed, and they are shown
embracing their crosses in ecstasy.
The design is a great recumbent cross: its base a forest of crosses, and
the extremity of the upright shows scattered crosses disappearing
into the endless bleakness of the Macedonian hills. The cross-pieces
extend from a solid nucleus of alert but recumbent mules, who we
are sure will not be excluded from the Resurrection; just above is the
figure of Christ, who receives the crosses the soldiers hand him or
lay at his feet. I draw attention to the design because this picture,
panoramic in its scope, crowded with figures, full of incident, of
subtle spiritual observation, forms a design as closely knit and
delicately adjusted as it is magnificent. In contrast to many of his
later works, which could, it would seem, be extended indefinitely
in any direction, the Burghclere Resurrection has limits that are clearly
184 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
defined, and the mass of detail, lovingly observed and meticulously
set down, is severely subordinate to the principal theme.
The wall-paintings at Burghclere-inspired by a vast and lofty
conception and carried out with mastery to the last detail-are
generally regarded with respect, and from time to time they are
acclaimed as a major work. But how trifling the stir they make com
pared, say, with the Chapel of the Rosary designed by Matisse for
the Dominican Nuns of Vence. In a letter to the Bishop of Nice the
most illustrious French artist of our time wrote, 'This work has
taken me four years of exclusive and assiduous work and it repre
sents the result of my entire active life. I consider it, in spite of its
imperfections, to be my masterpiece.' It scarcely needs to be said that
a building designed (in association with the distinguished architect
Auguste Perret) by Matisse and embellished by his wall-paintings -
or, more properly, mural drawings on glazed tiles -and with a
crucifix, an altar with its furniture, carved-wood confessional door,
metal spire and certain vestments all designed by the artist, is a work
of very great originality and distinction. Still less need it be said that
it stands in brilliant contrast to the shabby and meretricious art so
widely patronized by the Catholic Church to-day- an art which
tends to substitute conventional pieties for religious truth. But one
of the functions of a church is to fill those who worship in it with
the sense of being in the house of God. In spite of every beauty that
shining talent assiduously employed has been able to lavish upon it
the Vence Chapel remains spiritually thin. There is a story according
to which the Communist poet Louis Aragon said to Matisse after
looking at the working model, 'Very pretty-very gay-in fact,
when we take over we'll turn it into a dance hall/ Aragon's words
may have been prompted by malice but they were not spoken in
folly. Of greater significance is the serious and extended statement
published in the 'Chapelle du Rosaire' 1 in which Matisse declared:
*In the chapel my chief aim has been to balance a surface of light and
colour against a solid white wall covered with black drawings.' I
do not believe that Aragon would propose making the Burghclere
Oratory into a dance hall, or that Matisse could describe it as an essay
in aesthetics; yet the chapel at Vence was a legend almost as soon as it
was begun and the Oratory at Burghclere remains relatively unknown.
1 A booklet on the chapel published in 1951 at the time of its consecration.
i8. STANLEY SPENCER, Cedar Tree, Cookham (1934-5).
Oil, 30X 28 in. Coll, Major E. Beddington Behrens,
STANLEY SPENCER 185
My comparison might draw from an admirer of Matisse the
comment that, whatever the artist may have said about the Vence
chapel's being his masterpiece, Matisse is not, in any specific sense,
a religious artist or one who expresses himself most naturally upon
a grand scale. With such a comment I would not disagree. My
comparison is not between two artists but between two works of
art, and I believe that to-day's critical standards, according to which
Matisse is a widely acclaimed master and Stanley Spencer a Village
pre-Raphaelite' with an uncertain reputation in one country only,
and that his own, will be regarded by future generations as
very odd.
In the preceding volume I commented of Augustus John that he
was 'on the way to become "the forgotten man" of English paint
ing'. Since I then wrote he has emerged from the shadows to become
the somewhat undependable 'grand old man'. Still more obnoxious
to fashionable opinion, cast for John's successor in the part of
'forgotten man', Stanley Spencer has refused to submit, and from
time to time has engaged national attention with a canvas too large
and too tumultuous and too intensely alive to be ignored. But it
would be disingenuous to suggest that the work of this painter is
unsympathetic only to fashionable opinion. Instances abound of
cruel sayings of illustrious artists about the work of their peers, yet
it is true to say that there is apt to be among serious artists something
approaching recognition, although this may be grudging or even
tacit, of the qualities in one another's work. This may be so even
between bitter rivals. Witness the Fourteenth Discourse of Sir
Joshua Reynolds and the famous encounter between Delacroix and
Ingres. In the case of Stanley Spencer this recognition is minimal. A
few artists and a few critics have testified consistently to their belief
.that he is a major painter, but even these are mostly dead or belong
to an older generation. The artists active to-day whose work seems
to me most likely to withstand the erosion of time have expressed,
in my hearing, their small regard for his work, and, with a few
notable exceptions, others, too, whose judgment I most respect are
sharers in this disregard. Most of them admit to some respect for his
early works; it is the later that provoke their positive aversion. I
share their preference for the earlier works, the best of which,
however, seem to me to occupy places so outstanding among the
I g < 5 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
paintings of the age that the later, even though they do not rival
them, may yet be of extraordinary interest.
The paintings at Burghclere I regard as the last of these earlier
paintings, and, even if they lack the radiant purity of spirit that
shines out of Zacharias and Elizabeth, as the greatest. Once his art
ceased to be, in an intimate sense, a religious art, once it ceased to be
God-centred, Stanley Spencer's voracious interests ranged without
check. Everything became grist to his mill, and his later pictures
often give the impression of having been stopped only by the margin
of the canvas; that were a strip added he would fill it without
premeditation. A comment of my wife's upon his conversation is
peculiarly applicable to his later painting. After he and we had
engaged in several hours' talk, I said to her that there were few
subjects, however remote from his habitual interests, on which he
could not shed light. 'The trouble with Stanley,' she replied, 'is that
he sheds too much light; and everything is so brightly lit that there
isn't either light or shadow.' So in his painting; his passionate love of
whatever he happens to see, abetted by an extraordinary skill, robs
his painting of emphasis, and there are in consequence pictures which
have the monotonous look of a surface covered by some fantastic
mechanical process. I once said to him that he'd be happy painting
a white sheet, and he replied that this was so, and that a plain brick
wall would keep him occupied for weeks. I do not suggest that he
has directed his powerful talents to trivial ends. On the contrary he
has painted Resurrections and other religious subjects as well as
others of deep human significance; but it does seem to me that in so
doing he has treated every object represented, every inch of the
canvas, with an almost equal intensity, thereby robbing the whole of
a great part of the intensity that is one of the greatest qualities of his
earlier pictures. (It will not, I hope, be inferred from the foregoing
that I regard Tintoretto as a greater painter than Chardin simply
because he treated greater subjects. I mean no more, in effect, than
that it would have been a misuse of his particular talents had Tin
toretto foregathered, in his art, exclusively with loaves of bread.)
After the intense and long-sustained efforts required of him for the
completion of the paintings at Burghclere he returned to Cookham,
living at Lindworth, a largish house he purchased. For the first year
and a half his wife and their two children were with him, but later
STANLEY SPENCER 187
he was alone. Of all the people he has ever known Hilda Anne
Carline, his first wife, whom he married in February 1925, com
manded the largest share of his devotion. This did not, however,
allay tensions that ultimately brought his marriage to an end, but his
devotion to Hilda outlasted his marriage and endured until her
death in 1950. The tenderness with which he nursed her during a
last illness made the more terrible by mental derangement forms one
of several heroic incidents in the life of Stanley Spencer. In May 1937
he married Patricia Preece.
During these years he was mainly occupied with landscapes of
Cookham- G?J0r Tree, Cookham, 1 of 1935 (Plate 18), is a fine
example-and the country round about, and occasionally with a
religious subject. Although many of them appear to be the products
of a hand of extraordinary skill guided by an intensely keen but
wholly unreflective eye, commonplace images mechanically trans
ferred to canvas, the landscapes rarely fail to reveal under scrutiny,
a quality that makes them less unremarkable. This is his compre
hending love of his native place, and by a process of extension of all
places. There is a compulsive force about this love: those who look
at his paintings of Cookham and who might have been disposed to
regard the place as a slightly vulgarized up-river' resort, whose
pleasant but urbane traditional architecture is being steadily dis
placed by a species of poor man's 'stockbroker's Tudor', are forced
-however reluctantly~to see it as a place very much on its own, the
product of special social and historical impulses, and, taken all in all,
a very likeable place. We are compelled by Stanley Spencer to look
closely at Cookham, just as we are compelled by Mr. John Betjeman
to be aware of Victorian churches and villas-previously very
generally dismissed as monotonous eyesores, unworthy of serious
attention and differing from one another in little except in their
degrees of ugliness or absurdity-as architecture, subject to the same
laws as architecture of any other kind.
For the time being his huge exertions at Burghclere had exhausted,
and his widening interests in life had diluted, his religious impulse.
But something of it remained and proclaimed itself in his occasional
religious pictures, of which Sarah Tutt and the Angels* Villagers and
1 Coll. Major E. Beddington Behrens.
2 Coll. Major E, Beddington Behrens.
!88 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Saints? both of 1933, and St. Francis and the Birds* of two years
later, are characteristic examples. Indeed in some recent personal
comments on his own work 3 Stanley Spencer has recorded that on
the completion of the Burghclere paintings he planned in 1933
another chapel 'built also in the air as was first the Burghclere
Chapel, that is to say not commissioned'. He planned according to
an enormous scheme, in which figure paintings of the last twenty
years that one had regarded as independent works all have their
place. 'All the figure pictures done after 1932 were part of some
scheme, the whole of which scheme when completed would have
given the part the meaning I know it had. Having completed a
memorial chapel in which I seek to express the joys of peace in spite
of being in the midst of war, I then hoped to express the same peace
in its more positive state in times of peace.' In this scheme 'the
Village Street of Cookham was to be the Nave and the river which
runs behind the street was a side aisle. The Promenade of Women*- and
the Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors and the St. Francis and the
Birds and Villagers and Saints are fragments of the street scenes, and
the quite recent Listening from Punts Regatta scheme is a river aisle
fragment.' Sarah Tubb, Villagers and Saints belong to a cycle that he
calls the Pentecost scheme, as also does Separating Fighting Susans, of
1933, 'in which saints and angels visit Cookham, making trips
round the village and performing various acts of a benevolent kind'.
Dusting Shelves* of 1936, Workmen in the House,* of 1935, Love
among the Nations? of 1935-6, are also, according to the artist's
account, part of the same scheme; he calls them the 'Cana* cycle-
it was begun in 193 5 -and designs them to stress the value of
friendliness and love and the importance of everyday actions. 'He
called them the "Cana" scheme because the idea originated while
he was working on a picture of The Marriage at Cana* in which
women handling a trousseau played a major part/ 9
1 Coll. Mr. Wilfred Evill. 2 Coll. Dr. Lynda Gricr, C.B.E.
3 In the artist's introduction to the Catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition of
his work held by the Tate Gallery, November-December 1955.
4 Coll Mr. W. E. Kenrick. 5 Coll Mrs. J. M. Image.
6 Coll. Mr. Wilfred Evill. 7 Coll. Mr. Wilfred Evill.
8 Coll. Lord BeaverbrooL
9 'Some further notes on his figure painting', Catalogue to the Stanley Spencer
Retrospective Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 1955.
STANLEY SPENCER l8p
Let it be said at once that these pictures of 1933-5 z&d others of a
like kind express in varying degrees authentic religious feeling and
contain passages of unusual beauty and power. But Stanley Spencer
had set himself towering standards as a religious painter, and accord
ing to them the three pictures just mentioned cannot be accounted
as more than minor works. Their minor character, in fact, is mani
fest throughout, but in nothing so much as the manifestations they
exhibit of a desire to shock, even to outrage-a desire nowhere
apparent in the earlier works, even though these abound in examples
of the most idiosyncratic treatment of the human figure. There is,
for instance, something perceptibly clamorous for attention in the
figure of St. Francis, bloated, hunch-backed and supported by the
atrophied legs of a Ia2y old man. 1 This turbulent undercurrent no
doubt sprang from the painful consciousness that his religious im
pulse was less vigorous and less elevated than it had been.
Since the time of the Burghclere wall-paintings his imagination
would appear to have been dogged by certain obsessions, and in
particular by sexual obsessions of an extraordinary character. Unlike
the roseate fantasies of the generality of men these obsessions were
concerned with relations between the ugly, the infirm, and above
all the aged. I do not pretend to be able to cast much light upon this
singularity. The mind of Stanley Spencer has always been opposed,
in one important respect, to the classical mind, to which there is
almost always vividly present the conception of the perfect type of a
thing -be it the human face and figure, bird, beast and even tree-
towards which it is one of the functions of classical art slowly to
evolve. Anything approaching the perfect type of anything, and
almost all manifestations of conventional beauty, have always
repelled Stanley Spencer; he has shown a preference, which has
hardened with the passage of time into a grim determination, for
beauty of a very personal sort mined from shafts sunk in unpromis
ing or even forbidding places. It is therefore hardly to be expected
1 According to die artist, the figure of St. Francis is large and spreading to signify
that the teaching of St. Francis spread far and wide. He adds that 'the composition
was developed from a drawing made in 1924 of Hilda Carline reading in a hay
stack. The ducks and poultry were taken over almost unchanged, while St.
Francis and the roof were fitted into the main lines of what was originally the hay
stack/ I take this information from the note on the picture in the Catalogue to the
Retrospective Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 1955.
MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
that in his erotic imaginings either the classical beauty or her
popular equivalent the "cover girl' -the lowest common denomina
tor of feminine desirability-should play any part; but his pre
occupation with the sexual relations of the aged-for such is the
focus of these imaginings -is something for which I know no precise
parallel. Singular though this preoccupation may be, it accords
with certain of his innate predilections. It accords, as I suggested just
now, with his rejection of idealization: for the old, whether battered
or worn or corrupted or ennobled by their journey through life, are
of all humanity the farthest removed from 'perfect types', of all
humanity they are most conspicuously personifications of their
virtues and their vices, the most vividly revealing of themselves. If
at times they may disgust us, these aged lechers, who figure, for
example, in Adoration of Old Men, 1 of 1937, it would be a serious
error to forget the inclusiveness of Stanley Spencer's love, a love
which embraces virtually everything he sees -certainly his old
lechers -except ideal types of humanity or of anything else. Although
he rejects all idealization, I do not believe that he has ever seen a man
or woman who is, in the classical sense, ideal; but had he been
commissioned to paint a portrait of Adonis himself he would have
emphasized a lopsidedness in his face, and a strange look in his eyes
which nobody had ever noticed before. Stanley Spencer's pre
dilection was heightened, I think, by his enthralled identification, in
those early and radically formative years at home in Cookham, of
his parents with sex, which persisted in the form of an identification
of sex at its most active with persons older than himself.
Whether this time of absorption in singular manifestations of sex
had abated by the Second World War, I am not certain, even though
I saw him more continuously on the eve of it than at any previous
time. For it was in 1938 that he spent the autumn at our house on
Primrose Hill. My impression was that the acute tensions that
stimulated his sexual imaginings until they acquired a peculiar
domination over his work had begun to relax. It is an almost in
variable habit with him to speak about what is uppermost in his
mind, and although, in the course of the months he spent with us,
his conversation ranged over a vast variety of subjects, the one to
which he most often returned was a project for a series of paintings
1 Coll. Mr. R. Brinsley Ford.
STANLEY SPENCER
representing Christ in the Wilderness. This series of paintings, each
measuring twenty-two inches square, he planned to extend to forty,
and he spoke of his wish that each in turn should be shown somewhere
on a successive day in Lent, or else all together in the hexagonal or
octagonal vault of a church, where the figures in dirty whitish
would have the appearance of clouds in a 'mackerel' sky. The series
was begun with Christ in the Wilderness: ' The Foxes have Holes' 1 in the
second of the rooms, 179 and 188, which my wife found for him in
nearby Adelaide Road, and which he occupied from Christmas
1938 until 1940. He often used to speak of the way in which Thoreau's
'Walden' and to a lesser extent the writings of Richard Jefferies gave
him a deeper understanding of the relation of men with nature, and
in particular of the possibilities of living a passionate life in a wilder
ness alone.
Christ may have felt as I have sometimes felt when I have revisited after
many years a corner of a field where I had painted a clump of stinging
nettles, and have found them there again, hardly altered. I want to show
Christ in the Wilderness happy to see His early creations again and to be
intimate with them: through Christ God again beholds His creation and
this time has a mysterious occasion to associate Himself with it. In this
visitation he contemplates the many familiar, humble objects and places:
the declivities, holes, pits, banks, boulders, rocks, hills, fields, ditches,
and so on. The thought of Christ considering all these seems to me to
fulfil and consummate the life of wishes and meaning of all these things. 2
The second of the series, Christ praying in the Wilderness, 3 also con
stantly occupied his mind. This he intended as a dual revelation of
God, a revelation under two aspects, Himself and surrounding nature.
The form of the praying Christ would have its complement in the
altar-like boulder before which he would kneel, but without having
to change its natural form. He stressed at this time, as often before
and since, that he never distorts nature wilfully. 'People who are not
painters,' he said, 'never see how complicated nature is, a group of
moving people, for example. I want to express certain ideas, certain
feelings I have about people, or about places. If I could express my
self clearly and forcefully without any distortion of nature I would
do so, but to do that I would have to draw as well as Michelangelo.
1 Coll. Mr. Wilfred EvilL
2 Spencer also wrote down an account of this series for Mr. Dudley Tooth, who
has kindly put a copy at my disposal. 3 Coll. Mr. "Wilfred Evill.
MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
It's too bad that I don't draw as well as Michelangelo, because it
means that in order to say what I want I have sometimes to pull and
push nature this way and that.' But in this picture, he said, 1 hope
there will be no such strain: Christ's desire to pray and a boulder's
roughly assuming the shape of an altar would come inevitably
together/ Here and there he intended to introduce features that had
a special meaning for himself, such as a place beside a stream where
the water had worn away the bank and made a little bay with a
shingle beach. Such little bays along the Thames, with steep sides
and shingle beaches, were favourite places to play in when he was a
child. The idea sometimes troubled him that Christ should be
thought of as speaking in a derogatory sense of anything in nature,
of a scorpion or a fig-tree for example, and in this series of pictures
he wished to show Christ's loving intimacy with all nature, and his
being entertained by his creation *as I sometimes am by my pictures'.
If Christ ever referred in such a sense to anything he had created, he
would only have meant it not generally but in the sense described in
the particular instance. Therefore he had it in mind to show Our
Lord's affectionate contemplation of a scorpion. He was more pre
occupied, however, with the theme of Christ's contemplation of a
stone, and often spoke of the many references to a stone in the Old
and New Testaments and in particular of 'the mysterious words
about a stone in "Revelations" which I have long wondered about.
"To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna,
and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name
written which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.'" These
words held a special meaning for him, and he said of them that they
revealed to him how he found his own identity in the variety of
places and objects he comes to know. It was clear from his frequent
talks about this project that it was not part of his aim to draw a
distinction between man and the rest of nature, but rather to reveal,
by a kind of analogy, Christ's love for mankind by showing 'how
He lived in the wildernesses and forests, the fleshy lands of mankind'.
Long, however, before The Forty Days in the Wilderness was com
pleted he left London to live for a while at Leonards Stanley, a
village near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where I saw him from time
to time occupied mainly with landscape. By the following year 1940
he was committed to a project far greater in scale than The Forty
STANLEY SPENCER 193
Days and of infinitely greater complexity, a project that called for
the fullest use of all his powers. The War Artists' Advisory Com
mittee-set up in order to organize the making of the most compre
hensive possible record of the multifarious exertions of the British
people- decided to send Stanley Spencer to Port Glasgow to make
paintings of shipbuilding. At first he applied himself dutifully and to
some purpose to his subject, and the principal product of this
application is the Shipbuilding Series* of 1940-5, a series of big
pictures lacking in focus, the area of which might have been added
to indefinitely without significant addition to their impressiveness.
They contain representations of people and things of unusual clarity
and energy, but they are the least impressive of his big works. The
arid mechanical character that stamps them is due to the gradual
reversion of his attraction from the shipyards which he was com
missioned to record to the inevitable objects of his uncommissioned
interest: people and places. That the shipyards proved sufficient, or
almost sufficient for a time, the big composite picture testifies. But
I soon found [he wrote in his notebook] that the shipyard at Port
Glasgow is only one aspect of the life there. There were rows of men
and women hurrying in the streets, and high sunlit factory walls with
men sitting or standing or leaning back against them, and early shoppers
going to and fro; one day through the crack of a factory door I glimpsed
a cascade of brass taps; in a roadway (a very trafficky one) I saw children
lying on the ground using the road as their drawing-board and making
drawings in coloured chalk; and there was a long seat on which old men
sat removed from the passers-by like statues ... all this [he continued]
seemed to me full of some inward surging meaning, a kind of joy, that
I longed to get closer to and understand and in some way fulfil.
And then it came about, as it had come about before, that the
recording of all this interest in the life about him, panoramic and
minute, impassioned and vivid as it was, was a work that, by itself,
failed to bring his highest faculties into play. All this various teeming
life had to be drawn together and related by being made subordinate
to some large idea. The number of large ideas to which even the most
versatile of artists can respond with the whole of their being is very
limited. To this rule Stanley Spencer is no exception. It was there
fore, as I heard him say:
Back to the Bottle again: I had to paint another Resurrection.
1 The Imperial War Museum, London.
MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
[More formally in his notebook] I felt that all this life and meaning
somehow grouped round and in some way led up to the cemetery on
the hill outside the town, an oval saucer-upside-down-shaped hill hedged
in by high red brick tenements looking down on it; a sort of green
mound in a nest of red And I began to see the Port Glasgow '
Resurrection that I have drawn and painted in the last five years. As it
has worked out this hillside cemetery has become The Hill of Sion.
An identical emotion can affect different people in different ways.
Love of his own country, for example, can make one man hostile to
foreign countries yet give another a heightened appreciation of them.
The love of Stanley Spencer for his native place is not an exclusive
one and it stimulates his delight in other places, and on particular
occasions it brings him to fall in love with them, and when he loves
them he is liable to celebrate the relationship by making them the
scene of a Resurrection. There was the particular place among the
Macedonian hills, and there was Port Glasgow. At Leonards Stanley
in 1940, where he was mostly occupied with landscape of a relatively
conventional character, there came a moment when he was moved
to imagine a Resurrection in the small nearby town of Stonehouse.
The result of this imagining was the triptych Resurrection: Raising of
Jairuss Daughter* of 1947, of which the two outer panels were drawn
in 1940 at Leonards Stanley, although the work was finished at Port
Glasgow. In spite of its inspiration by a photograph seen in the house
where he lodged at Leonards Stanley and the representation of
Stonehouse Church in the left panel, this picture may be placed in
the Port Glasgow group, among which indeed it is one of the best.
His relationship with Port Glasgow was more passionate and of
longer duration than that with the Gloucestershire valley. That Port
Glasgow, lived in during the bracing climate of the war, stirred his
imagination as no other place since Macedonia, the pictures the
place inspired clearly testify; but these pictures-impressive in scale
and quality as they are-form only fragments of the gigantic picture
he originally conceived, which called for a canvas fifty feet in width.
In fact, of all the Port Glasgow pictures, only The Resurrection: Port
Glasgow? 1947-50, and The Hill of Sion* 194.6, are on the scale of
his original project.
In considering this vast interrelated group that has grown up about
1 The Southampton Art Gallery. 2 The Tate Gallery, London.
3 The Harris Art Gallery, Preston.
STANLEY SPENCER Ip5
The Resurrection: Port Glasgow to which, were the painter given the
opportunity, he would doubtless be adding panel by panel still, the
mind inevitably turns back to the only two works in the art of
modern England with which they can be at all closely compared:
their predecessors, the Resurrections at Cookham and in Macedonia.
From these two the latest group differs in one respect so important
as to compel us to assign to it an inferior place among his works.
Let it be said at once that the Port Glasgow group are works of an
extraordinary character. I know of no painter in England, or indeed
Europe, who would express himself, with perfect naturalness, upon
so gigantic a scale, who could so easily pack so huge a space with a
harvest of such intense and original imaginings and such sustained
and minute observation that his constant need is for more space and
always more space. Nothing, for instance, could be more unlike the
authentic bigness of Stanley Spencer's conceptions than those of
Frank Brangwyn, the other English painter who habitually painted
large. To Brangwyn belongs big, bold, indeed a somewhat swagger
ing, handwriting and abundant physical energy, and these have
misled him and other persons and corporate bodies into supposing
him to be a painter who works naturally upon a heroic scale. But
even a superficial examination of a big picture by Brangwyn will
show that, at a loss how to fill the space he has claimed, he has
introduced exotic heaps of fruit, of bubble-like clouds and other
romantic stage properties to garrison, so to speak, areas which he
lacks the power to colonize. The power of genuine expression upon
a great scale is an indication of exceptional creative power, but it is
not a proof of it. And a work, however heroic in scale, however
packed with intense, closely related incident, may yet fail, and I
believe that the qualities of the Port Glasgow pictures-for all their
notable characteristics -do fail according to the standard set by their
two great precursors. The chief cause of their comparative failure is
that they fail fully to perform their function, the representation of
the Resurrection. No matter the variations of emphasis that differ
ing traditions may place upon the event, there is no question of the
awfulness of the call, coming like a thunderclap, that will end for
ever the daily round of the living and will bring from their graves
the countless millions who are now dead, and will be a warning
momentous beyond reckoning-the most momentous warning any
Ip6 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
man has ever heard-that they must shortly face the ultimate ordeal
of human existence, the Last Judgement. In order to represent the
Resurrection it is necessary to represent the people, called and arising
from their graves, but it is also necessary to show that besides
emerging from their graves they are entering, in a uniquely intimate
yet awful fashion, into the presence of their Creator. In the Cook-
ham and Macedonian Resurrections, in spite of the loving and minute
way in which the artist has dwelt upon the resurrecting people, he
has also charged the atmosphere with momentousness, which com
pels us to listen, as it were, to hold our breath, to await intently what
is to follow. In the Port Glasgow pictures the artist has concerned
himself only with the people, with their rich variety, with their
distinct personalities and conditions, with touching relations
between them; but what he fails to give is any sense of their doing
anything beyond emerging from their graves. Of the imminence of
the Last Judgement, or even that there is anything momentous -as
distinct from extxaordinary-about what they are doing, he gives no
slightest hint. What he gives us instead is anecdote: anecdote
grandly, at points even splendidly, conceived, but anecdote none the
less. Conscious always of the presence of the dead, ubiquitously
buried underground, what he has painted in the Port Glasgow
Resurrection is a gigantic Cookham conversation piece; the presence
of God and the significance of the Resurrection are alike elbowed out
by the surging crowds of the quick and the dead, the throng of
Cookham villagers lustily shoving and pushing, meeting and em
bracing, doing this, that and the other, and endlessly gossiping.
Absorbed as Stanley Spencer is in the day-to-day life about him, the
holy suburb of heaven has become an uncelestial suburb of London,
and he himself much more a village Rowlandson than a village
Giotto. The difference between the two earlier works and this one
corresponds to the difference between the related scenes from the
Old and New Testaments represented by the painters of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries and the episodic popular moralities and
fables favoured by those of the later Middle Ages. The light that
Stanley Spencer is able to throw upon any great matter here
falls too uniformly, illuminating everything well, yet illuminating
nothing with the intense brightness that belongs to his most inspired
moments.
STANLEY SPENCER 197
Like Constable and Wordsworth he received in childhood his
most powerful and his most fruitful impressions. The joy of being
able to perceive in all the fulness of its meaning the essence of a
particular place or situation is the motive power of his art. And this
joy really belongs, he wrote, 'to all the happy and benigne [sic]
religious elements of my early days In fact nothing has (for me)
any meaning of form and shape excepting it is perceived in this
religious joy/ 1 It is a melancholy intractable fact that this artist,
whose mind is stored with so great an abundance of visual images,
and who is so generously responsive to his surroundings, has in the
course of more than forty years of painting moved far from the
original source of his inspiration, and, inevitably, something has been
lost. Two things, however, have not been lost, or even weakened-
the prodigality of his imagination and the urgency of his effort to
express 'a particular meaningfulness' inherent in a place or situation.
I must add, however, that Stanley Spencer himself, who is the
first to confess the fading of a vision in 1922-3, also underlines the
adverse effect on his work of his inability to see or to complete the
whole of the painting schemes that he has conceived. In connexion
with the pictures of 1933-5 an d with the more recent Listening from
Punts, for instance, all conceived, as already noted, as parts of one
whole, he has lately written that:
the whole work was far too big for me to undertake unless I could
devote the whole of my time to it and this I was far from being able to
do. The not being able to see the whole of my way had the same effect
on the way I painted as occurred if and when I painted in a state of
doubt. I knew if I could spare the time I could do it. But I was doing a
lot of landscapes and portraits and this took almost all my time 2
In consequence, as he continues,
as and when I painted them, I never felt the joy I needed to experience
in doing this work that I should have felt had I known that I could
complete the scheme. The works suffered. They have not the conviction
that comes with joy. As I have done them the knowledge that the final
meaning may never be done has had a crushing effect.
When The Resurrection: Port Glasgow was exhibited in 1950 the
artists whose work I most admired and whose opinions I generally
1 Letter to the writer, 10 October 1952.
2 In his draft Introduction to the Catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition at
the Tate Gallery, 1955.
Ip8 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
respected were among its severest critics. When the canvas pro
posed for the Tate came under consideration their murmurings
against it grew in volume and acerbity. It was acquired, in con
sequence, only after many difficulties had been overcome. But there
were others besides professional painters whose antipathies it pro
voked. At the Academy Banquet that same year I took an oppor
tunity of inviting the opinion of Sir Winston Churchill upon its
merits. In response to a request for mine, I pointed to the back-
stretching arm of a figure in the left foreground, saying that if the
critics of the picture saw, for instance, such an arm on the murky
wall of some church in Italy they would recognize it as masterly.
'But it is incorrectly articulated,' he objected, extending his own left
arm in a similar position, 'you must admit that.' 'I don't admit it,'
I had to reply, 'and I have the advantage of being able to see both
arms.' 'I concede that,' he said sternly, 'but I still don't like the
picture; and moreover, if that is the Resurrection, then give me
eternal sleep/ Although it does not constitute an excuse for certain
of the picture's short-comings, it is relevant to mention that the
artist never had the use of a room large enough to accommodate the
whole work, and that he never saw it until the pieces were put
together at Burlington House. Not long before its exhibition I paid
a visit to Cliveden View, his tiny house at Cookham. Disjointed
fragments of the picture stood in various rooms, the largest fragment
no wall of his little painting room was able to accommodate, and it
covered a part of the floor as well. Stanley Spencer, brush in hand,
feet in socks, walked with loving circumspection about its surface.
While I was engaged upon these pages, in the summer of 1952,
and meditating upon the extraordinary power which continuously
emanated from the tiny person of Stanley Spencer, manifest in his
painting, his drawing and his conversation, in the endless succession
of his ideas, in the energy to give them substance and form, he him
self arrived. 'Back at the bottle,' he announced, opening a portfolio.
'This time it's Christ preaching from a boat at Cookham Regatta.'
Kneeling on the floor he laid drawing against drawing until it was
all but covered with them. He confessed to his jubilation at being
able to see, on our own drawing-room floor, all the sketches for this
project together, and described the several expedients he had tried
unsuccessfully at home to gain this comprehensive view. As he
STANLEY SPENCER
talked he created for us, out of sixty or so slight but careful pencil
studies, the compelling image of Christ speaking to multitudes who
stood pressing towards Him on the lawn of a Thameside hotel and
who sat in innumerable boats; a vast multifarious repertory of the
life of Cookham focused on the figure preaching from a boat.
MARK GERTLER
1891-1939
TWO contradictory views prevail about Gertler: the one held
by those disposed to favour art that is produced near the centre
from which the dominant style of the time radiates; to the
other incline those who are disposed to believe that the only way for
an art to be universal is to be local and particular. Gertler became a
painter with a style of his own, the product of a highly personal
character and of an immediate environment that offered the strong
est contrast to the rest of the society in which it was set, and narrowly
circumscribed. Early in life he emerged from the environment that
had so largely formed him, and was drawn within the orbit of Post-
Impressionism. To some, therefore, Gertler was a gifted provincial
whose art ripened as it moved ever nearer to the Parisian sun; to
others he seemed an inspired provincial whose art lost its savour as it
became more metropolitan. The despair with which the painter was
afflicted at intervals throughout his life sprang from doubts about
the road he had taken, as well as the genuineness of his talent.
Both the views I have outlined are extreme ones, and when I
visited the discerningly selected memorial exhibition at the White-
chapel Art Gallery in 1949 -where it was possible for the first time
to see the whole range of the artist's work-it seemed to me that
while neither view was fully confirmed by the pictures themselves
something of an impressive and even a startling rarity died gradually
away as his art conformed more and more closely to the accepted
canons of Post-Impressionism, although certain gains, notably in
solidity and concentration in design, were also apparent.
The spirit and the form of a work of art are indissolubly inter
connected, for the first can find expression only through the second,
and yet it is a commonplace that there are works simple, even
elementary, in form which touch deeper chords than others more
elaborate and accomplished. The impression left by the exhibition
was that in the course of his life as a painter his powers of expression
grew but that what he had to express diminished: with him, it was,
19. MARK GERUER. The Artist's Mother (1911).
Oil, 26 X 22 in. The Tate Gallery, London,
MARK GERTLER 201
so to speak, youth that knew, and age-middle age at least- that
could. If Gertler had been an abstract painter, or even an exponent
of the then fashionable doctrine of 'significant form', the increase in
his powers of composition, of giving weight and solidity to his
forms, might have compensated for the ultimate weakening and
coarsening of his sense of actuality, his sense of the dramatic element
in life. But Gertler was not solely, not even primarily, concerned
with the making of coloured forms which should be their own
justification; he was a man whose art was deeply implicated in life.
It therefore seems to me that in spite of the indisputable aesthetic
qualities of his later work it was the work of his youth that expressed
what was finest in him and was most intimately his.
It is for this reason that I propose to give most of my attention to
this painter's beginnings.
Gertler was born on 9 December 1891, though he himself always
gave 1892 as the year of his birth. (It is an odd coincidence that
Stanley Spencer, who was born that year, also supposed 1892 to be
the year of his birth, and did not discover his error until he was past
fifty.) He was the third son and fifth child of Louis Gertler, master
furrier, and his wife Golda, 1 born Berenbaum, of a family of emi
grants from Przemysl in Galicia. Shortly before the artist's birth his
family decided to *try their luck* in London, but the foothold they
gained there was a precarious one and only a year afterwards they
were returned with the help of the Jewish Board of Guardians to
their native country 'with only me, as it were', the artist wrote many
years later, *to show for it'. Although he was born in London, at
1 6 Gun Street, Spitalfields, he lived from 1893 until 1898 in Galicia.
After the artist's death a manuscript was found in his studio. This
proved to be an autobiographical fragment he had written covering
his earliest years, and of this document I have been permitted to make
use.
On account of their obscurity and their poverty, the Gertler
family belonged to an order of society the members of which leave
behind few records or none at all. There is, therefore, no way of
checking the accuracy of these fragments, but they affected me not
only as a truthful but as a singularly candid narrative, yet free from
any trace of exhibitionism. It is written in a lucid, informal style,
1 It appears as Kate in the artist's birth certificate.
202 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
and it must be a matter for regret that Gertler did not live to com
plete the annals of his full but troubled life.
This candour is manifest on the first page of the typescript. A
constant and affectionate friend, the friend, in fact, who had given
him most encouragement for his projected autobiography, gave on
a formal occasion a considered judgment upon the character of
the subject of this study. *It would be nonsense to call him a good
man,' wrote Sylvia Lynd in her introduction to the catalogue of a
posthumous exhibition, 1 '. . . and I doubt if his behaviour was ever
consciously influenced by any moral consideration/ Mitigating con
siderations follow this downright declaration, and these I will take
into account later on. But for the present my purpose is to show with
what frankness and promptitude Gertler acknowledges the freedom
of his family and himself from moral scruples. 1 don't know exactly
how old I was and unfortunately I cannot ask my family to help me/
runs the first sentence of his autobiographical fragment, 'because the
first incident I remember with clarity contains a certain amount of
deception, even slyness on my part. 5 He is four years old and the
family is still in Austria. It is winter and his mother incites an elder
brother to steal a warm little coat from the factory where he works
so that the little boy may be protected from the cold. The mother
promises, if he is successful, that she will pretend that the coat is
a present from his father, who is in America. Pretending to sleep
the little boy listens to the conversation between his mother and
brother. In due course the brother brings back the stolen coat. This
is his only clear memory, he tells us, of the five years he spent with
his family in Austria.
In relating this incident he does not justify the conduct of his
mother and brother on the grounds of their desperate poverty: he
treats it as a commonplace occurrence, and the only moral con
sideration he voices relates not to the incitement to steal and the
resulting theft but solely to his own deception in pretending not to
hear what in fact he heard. Throughout life Gertler had in fact a
hatred of deceit and was particularly straightforward about money:
if he needed .5, say, he would ask to be given .5; he would not
pretend he was borrowing it. He had a strong sense, too, of human
dignity, and this mitigated deficiencies of moral conscience in the
1 Held at the Leicester Galleries, May-June 1941.
MARK GERTLER 203
conduct of daily life. Consciously or not, I think that his love of
what seemed real to him and his revulsion from what seemed unreal
impelled him to proclaim, in this first paragraph of the autobio
graphical fragment, his detachment from moral considerations.
If his family had been miserably poor in their brief stay in London,
in Austria their plight became desperate. Their relations clubbed
together to buy them a little inn on the outskirts of Przemysl,
frequented mostly by drunken soldiers, but the inn failed and his
father tried hawking boots, then buttons ... 'he actually went out
into the market-place with both my brothers -he, a very, very
proud man-and in that market-place where he was so well-known
-and managed to articulate in a sort of shy undertone, "Buttons,
Buttons".' But nobody bought his buttons, and unable to support
the misery of his family he determined to try his fortune in the New
World. 'Let me have a clean shirt, Golda,' he said, 'for this evening
I go to America. 5 During his absence his family suffered the direst
poverty: at one time their mother worked in a restaurant, her only
wages scraps of left-over food. But after about four years word came
from their father that things had gone well with him-it seems that
he had entered the fur trade and learnt some new process- and that
they were to meet him in London. Although Gertler's memories of
Przemysl remained vague, from the time of the journey to England
'the kernel of each event remains vivid, and the essentials connected
and alive'. The arrival is vividly recalled: 'I am standing surrounded
by my family all ready with heavy packages straining from their
necks, pressing their backs. All available limbs are grasping rebel
lious packages. My mother strains her eyes and says, "Oh woe is me,
but I cannot see your father. He is not there, he is not there.
Later he caught sight of abright-colouredshop-Gardiner'sof White-
chapel. 'Mother, does the King live here?' he enquired. It was then,
he wrote, at the age of six, with Yiddish his only language, that his
true life began. This true life was hardly begun when he suffered one
of those fits of acute depression which afflicted him throughout his
life and at last cut it short. The Gertler family- all seven of them -
spent their first night in one of the two tenement rooms in Shore-
ditch of a friend from Przemysl, and the sight of them lying in a
row on a floor covered by sacks brought on a fit of depression that
he always remembered as the first which he consciously suffered.
204 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
With the friend from Przemysl they lived until their father found
work smoothing walking-sticks with sandpaper at 12/6 a week. This
enabled them to set up a home of their own. At this point Gertler
breaks off his narrative in order to describe an expedition to the
scenes of his childhood made with his wife in the middle nineteen-
thirties. He notes 'the greater vitality' of the life there, the way in
which 'the rich dark-complexioned boys and girls seemed to move
and talk with unusual intensity, as if life was fearfully important',
and finally he describes their visit to the ancient, dilapidated syna
gogue he had formerly attended. On first entering, scarcely able any
longer to talk Yiddish, he felt extremely uncomfortable, almost a
stranger, but by degrees he was drawn momentarily back to the
observances of his earlier years. How admirably he describes their
visit! The preliminary conversation with the 'shumm', a sort of
verger-who, puzzled by their wishing to visit this derelict place,
tries to persuade them to go to a smarter synagogue where, he assures
them, there are 'well-to-do people 5 -is related with economy and
humour. But the best part of the entire account, to my thinking, is
the description of their entry into the building.
Yes, it was impressive, [it runs] the same as ever scattered here and
there, sometimes in groups, sometimes single were these same magni
ficent old men I used to know. The long silver beards and curls, looking
like princes in their rags and praying shawls -swaying, bending, moan
ing, groaning at their prayer. Passionate, ecstatic, yet casual and
mechanical. Lucky old Rembrandt to have lived in a time when such
subject matter was still fresh, when it was right to paint these men. They
look magnificent; but I do not want to paint them. As soon as we
entered they noticed our presence, and began slowly but surely to make
their gyrations more towards our direction, so that, at last, it seemed
almost as if their prayers were directed at us. Meanwhile, one praying
man near me pushed a prayer-book into my hand, and looking down
at its opened pages, I found that. I had even more completely forgotten
my Hebrew than my Yiddish. However, I too began to bend a little,
moan a little, and sway taking care to do so in the direction of the main
group at the far end of the synagogue- whose curiosity had made them
turn towards ours. . . .
In part it was, perhaps, a reassertion of old habits, but-for Gertler
was always quick at mimicry-in part it was an exercise of his ready
and abundant gift of mimicking what struck his imagination.
MARK GERTLER 205
Before resuming the narrative of his childhood, he made another
excursion to the near present: this time to speak of an old cat-a
Visiting' cat of whom he had grown fond. But his wife was away,
and the neighbours to whom the cat belonged left, and then the
tenants from downstairs, and with them most of the animal's means
ofsubsistence.
How much older, decrepit, shabby and down-at-heel he was looking!
[Gerder noted.] Then yesterday-the final blow-an empty house, just
he and I. ... At about 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon I got panicky.
How silent the house was But I have another whole month here
I am suddenly frightened, I don't even know how to get through the
next 3 hours, till my teaching. . . . Damn! the cat is getting on my
nerves,, All right, all right, we'll have tea. Heavens, there's no milk. . . .
The cat is still meowing and looking me straight in the eye. I can stand
it no longer. I kick him down the stairs ! Yes, I kicked him. This morn
ing the man came with the brown basket. Goodbye cat ...
This small drama of the lonely man and the plaintive cat left by
themselves in the empty house sheds as clear a light upon the
character of Gertler as the episode of the stolen jacket. There is a
touching quality in his sorrow because 'the old cat has been carried
off in a basket to be "put to sleep". ... I shall never see him again,' a
sorrow uncomplicated by his own capricious responsibility for the
cat's death, and the truthfulness with which it is all related. The power
to feel keenly, moral irresponsibility, and innate candour-all are
richly manifest.
When he resumes his narrative it is to describe his school days.
When he was seven years old he was sent to 'Chaida' or Hebrew
class taught by an old rabbi who used to read out the Old Testa
ment in Hebrew, translating into Yiddish 'in a rapid, hardly in
telligible, monotone, and we had to drone on after him, repeating
the parts we could catch, and filling up the rest with noises that
meant nothing whatsoever*.
One day this harmless if unfruitful curriculum was abruptly
ended. His parents, who lived in an almost closed society of emi
grants from Eastern Europe, rarely moving far from their home
and with few contacts with the larger society about them, knew
nothing of their obligation to send their children to school. The visit
of an angry inspector led to Gertler's enrolment at the nearby Deal
Lane School.
20 <5 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
He thus describes his entry:
It was a hot day, and as soon as we joined the queue, my mother for
some reason lifted me into her arms and held me there in a manner she
used when I was younger. I felt uncomfortable but did not protest, and
soon I began to notice beads of sweat gathering, like pearls, on her
forehead and temples, then join and trickle down her cheeks in thin
glistening streams. Then I heard a woman saying, 'Why do you carry
such a big boy in your arms, Mrs.? Ain't he old enough to stand? 7 1 felt
ashamed and tried to wriggle down, but my mother gathered her arms
around me tighter, and held me there, not deigning even to answer the
woman.
At last our turn came to approach the desk, at which a man was
sitting, very stern and angry, making us feel from the start that we were
somehow in die wrong, and that he jolly well meant to let us have it'.
'Put that boy down, at once. He's not a babe! Name of Gertler, I see.
What's his Christian name?'
Of course my mother could make nothing of it at all, until some
women at the back came to the rescue. 'Mux,' she said.
'Mux,' said the man, 'never heard such a name-no such name in this
country. We'll call him Mark Gertler/
Towards the end of this autobiographical fragment (which covers
only thirty-two small typewritten sheets) he mentions various cir
cumstances of his upbringing which afford further insight into his
character and situation. In desolation at finding himself at a strange
school,
I glanced at the children nearest me, as if to discover whether I dare
give way to the tears that were choking me, but realised instantly that
here was a new situation; that here, in this atmosphere one must try
not to cry, and I succeeded in controlling my emotions -perhaps for the
first time in my short life.
Both the total absence of any parental training in self-control and
the sobering impact of a strange society in which a measure of
self-control was the rule clearly emerge from his description of
his entry into school. And both these circumstances coloured his
relations with the society into which he shortly emerged, a society in
which, in spite of much success and many friendships, he felt himself
at heart a stranger who continually exposed himself by his inability
to control his feelings, and therefore at a perpetual disadvantage
among people cooler and more disciplined. Self-control was made
MARK GERTLER 207
the more difficult by continual insufficiency of sleep. Golda Gerder,
completely self-sacrificing though she was, used him unwisely:
unfortunately like most people . . . some of the most important things
in connection with the upbringing of a child were quite unknown to
her, and I consider the most disastrous of these was the fact that we were
allowed to go to bed at any old hour. ... I was a very nervous, highly-
strung and emotional child, somewhat undersized, thin and pale, yet
I would hardly ever be put to bed before . . . midnight, and at week
ends . . . long past that hour.
This constant lack of sleep in his childhood no doubt played its
part in weakening his nervous system, and in particular in darkening
and prolonging his fits of depression.
It was while he was at Deal Lane that there occurred what was
beyond comparison the most important event of his life. He noticed
a poster advertising beef extract. The impression it made was
heightened by the sight of some still-lifes by a pavement artist, and
he began to draw still-lifes on the pavement beside his parents' house.
Encouraged by the oil paints and water-colours that his family gave
him and-according to a persistent tradition-by the reading, on long-
continued daily visits to a bookshop, of 'My Autobiography and
Reminiscences' by W. P. Frith, he determined to be an artist. At the
age of fifteen he briefly attended classes at the Regent Street Poly
technic, and in December 1907 he started work for five shillings a
week (with the promise of 7/6 after the completion of six months
satisfactory service) with Clayton and Bell, glass painters, at 311
Regent Street.
In the October of the following year- on the seventh to be precise
-I myself had a glimpse of him. My parents were living at that time
at ii Oakhill Park, Hampstead, and here, on hearing the front-door
bell ring, I used occasionally to hurry to the hall and open the door
before the maid arrived. Doing so that day I was confronted by a
shortish, handsome boy with apricot-coloured skin and a dense mop
of dark brown hair so stiff that it stood on end. I took him for a
barrow boy, but he said he had been sent to see my father. I was
seven years old, but I still remember his nervous, sullen look. Years
later I was told that he was accompanied by his elder brother Jack,
who used to carry his paintings and slip away upon arrival. I would
not, of course, have known the year let alone the date when this
208 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
unimportant encounter took place had I not seen, quite recently, the
letter, dated 8 October, which my father wrote to Gertler's father.
'Your son,' it runs, 'as you know came here yesterday ... I do
sincerely believe that your son has gifts of a high order, and that if
he will cultivate them with love and care . . . you will one day have
reason to be proud of him. . . .' This letter his parents framed and
hung up in their house, and he preserved it after their deaths. The
educational society which had sent Gertler to see my father, acting
on the advice he gave, sent him to the Slade, where he remained
from 1908 until 1912. His precocious abilities won him immediate
success: he was awarded the Slade Scholarship for the sessions
1908-9 and 1909-10, a first prize for Head Painting, and a second
prize for Painting from the Cast, and in 1909 a certificate for paint
ing: an outstanding record. But besides jumping through all the
hoops he became, in the warm yet invigorating air of the Slade, a
painter of impressive powers. Some of the pictures he painted while
still a student take their place among his finest works; and surely too
among the finest painted by a student during the period considered
in these pages. Of these to my thinking The Artist's Mother, 1 of 1911,
(Plate 19), has a place apart. I saw this portrait in 1944, and pro
posed it for purchase under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest, and
this work by an artist not yet twenty years old emerged without
discredit from the searching criticism of my Academy colleagues
on the Recommending Committee. The Artist's Mother possesses,
abundantly, the essential quality of a portrait: the power of evoking
an entirely convincing presence. In the presence of a self-portrait by
Rembrandt we are in the presence not of paint and canvas but,
miraculously, of Rembrandt, a silent and immobile Rembrandt,
but of Rembrandt himself. So, lower in the scale of creation, does
Gertler evoke for us the presence of Golda, his mother, who with
out the rudiments of education, without having seen a picture, from
the first apprehended a mysterious difference between her youngest
child and his brothers and sisters, and even the importance of the
strange calling to which her son was dedicated. In his mother's
reassuring presence, in her little kitchen, he felt a confidence that
enabled him to paint. But it is not for the evocation of a personality
that this picture is most remarkable, but for the sheer capacity to
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
MARK GERTLER 2Op
paint that it manifests. The patient, devoted face, the sturdy figure,
are indeed impressively represented, but the weight and texture of
the heavy silk of the voluminous, fusty dress, and above all, the
folded hands, solidly realized, modelled with extreme subtlety, and
instinct with life, more impressively still. The painting of those hands
is masterly by any standards, and in the twentieth century masterly
painting is rarer than at other times.
I quoted just now a phrase from the autobiographical fragment
about the way in which the East End boys and girls 'seemed to move
and talk with unusual intensity, as if life was fearfully important-
momentous'. The description fits perfectly Gertler's own way of
seeing. And rather as by their long winters spent largely indoors
hedged in by familiar faces, the subjects of daily scrutiny, the
painters of the Low Countries developed a heightened realism, so
was the exuberant yet searching vision of Gertler intensified by its
strict confinement within narrow limits. He lived his life in a tiny
alien enclave utterly cut off by religious observance, by prejudice, and
during these first years by the barrier of language, from the en
circling population; and within that alien enclave there was the
family circle, if not precisely closed, at any rate exclusive. An eye
accustomed to take horizons within its sweep would be less likely
to focus so avidly upon small things and to treat them as 'fearfully
important- momentous'. Take even The Teapot, 1 painted seven
years after the portrait, when his eye had accustomed itself to rather
wider prospects: how authoritatively he compels us to recognize the
uniqueness of its shape, its colours, its density, in a word its
momentousness. Nothing could be more remote from the casual
glance ordinarily bestowed upon an ordinary teapot than the
absorbed and loving scrutiny in which Gertler held it until it became
'momentous'.
The absorption and love of his scrutiny did not make for pedantry
of any kind, for an over-concern with detail, for instance; it gave
him, on the contrary, the assurance to represent his subjects largely.
The Teapot, indeed, does not stand quite foursquare on the tray, and
it has a lid with a knob imperfectly related to it, but neither of these
defects disturbs our sense of its 'momentousness'.
At the beginning of this study I mentioned the contradictory
1 The Tate Gallery, London.
210 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
opinions held about Gerder's development, and commented that I
myself inclined- with certain reservations -to regard his earlier work
as that most likely to survive. For to me the quality, beyond all
others, that makes it precious is this power of making the subjects
he represented appear 'momentous'. It springs partly from youth,
more susceptible than maturity or age to see intensely, but also from
the peculiar narrowness of the artist's early surroundings. This
narrowness, amounting almost to isolation, imposed upon his
emotions a discipline that precluded their dissipation and focused
them upon a few loved and familiar things and people. It is in the
early works, drawn and painted before his horizon opened out, that
this 'momentousness' is most luminous. Something of it appears in
The Apple Woman and Her Husband, 1 of 1912, which represents his
mother and his wistful little father. Although richer, clearer and
more varied in colour, and more ambitious as a design, than The
Artist's Mother, there is about it just a suggestion of self-conscious
artistry, and its impact is a little lighter. But in the small group of
these early works nowhere is 'momentousness' so poignantly present
as it is in Rabbi and Rabbitzen? of 1914, an old couple seen with
extraordinary insight through eyes at once wise yet innocent, search
ing yet affectionate. I fall Gertler's work were to perish except this, it
would serve as a microcosm of the precisely focused intensity that
gives the best of his early work a glowing actuality in the company
of which most others seem the lifeless products of indifference.
It was intimate contact with the things that he saw and experi
enced for himself before he emerged out of the confined existence
of a member of a little, isolated group of foreign immigrants that
excited all his faculties to their highest pitch. The capital, so to speak,
that he accumulated during those early years lasted for some time
after he left the Slade, but his sudden exposure as a student to
pressures of every kind tried and sometimes compromised the
integrity of his way of seeing. The circumstance of his having come
from a class in which none of the arts were practised or even thought
of made him the more susceptible to such pressures. Emergence
from what, for an artist, was penitential bleakness into a world
where the arts were practised on all hands and where the evidences
of their having been practised for centuries abounded in art gallery,
1 Coll. Lady Daniel 2 Coll. Mr. Jeremy Hutchinson.
MARK GERTLER 211
church and private house must have been intoxicating; and con
sidering how radically uncertain he always was of the validity of his
art, it must be a matter for gratitude that he resisted so strongly and
preserved so much. Evidence of pressure from outside is evident
from the moment of his emergence. The Artist's Sister, 1 the late
Deborah Atelson, of 1911, an exuberant figure exuberantly dressed,
has energy and largeness of form, but it clearly reveals, particularly
in its colour, the influence of Brown and Steer, his teachers at the
Slade. This is a handsome painting; but one made the folio wing year,
Portrait of a Girl* shows how debilitating these pressures could be.
In this picture there is no trace of the weight and exuberance, or
yet of the close, affectionate scrutiny that marked all the works
mentioned above; it is a languid essay in the manner of Augustus
John or Henry Lamb: but these artists, so to speak, tidied up, and
the girl dressed for the occasion in fashionably 'bohemian' clothes.
Ironically, the spotted kerchief on her head is that worn by his
mother in The Apple Woman and her Husband. This feeblest of the
artist's early paintings, in which- fortunately only for the moment-
he turned his back upon everything in his past that had made him
an artist, was presented to the Tate in 1923 and remained for seven
teen years the Gallery's sole representation of the art of Gertler. One
of his paintings of the following year reveals susceptibility to
influence from another direction, for The Jewish Family* testifies to
his close study of Picasso. In this picture he attempted to represent
one of his traditional subjects with the pathos and the attenuated
delicacy of a work of this painter's 'blue' or 'pink' period. In spite
of his continuing admiration this remained, so far as I am aware, a
solitary experiment. His development, in fact, took a different
direction. Sometime about the beginning of the First World War
a new and fruitful element made its appearance in his painting, an
element more easily recognized than described. It was as though life
presented itself to this contemplation less as a kind of reality per
ceptible to the ordinary eye than as a kind of puppet-show at a fair.
This is an overstatement, but it indicates something of the impersonal
character, the simplified forms, the robust colours, the humour that
marked the finest of his paintings after he left the Slade and that
1 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston. 2 The Tate Gallery, London.
3 The Tate Gallery, London.
212 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
gave them sometliing of the character of products of a sophisticated
and expressive folk-art. Whether the emergence of this element was
due to something he had recently seen, to something innate, or to
some childhood or even inherited memory of folk-art in Eastern
Europe, I cannot say; but it is perhaps relevant to recall that it was
by an example of popular art, a poster advertising a meat extract,
that he was first moved to draw.
The first important painting known to me with this folk-art
overtone is Mr. Gilbert Cannan at his Mill, 1 of 1914-15, in which the
novelist is shown standing with his dog outside the windmill in
which he lived at Cholesbury in Hertfordshire, the scene, inciden
tally, of one of the lamentable occasions of the artist's life. The
interest of the scene itself, the odd man beside his strange home, the
upright converging Gothic forms, all treated with a robustness,
almost, one might say, a heartiness, that makes sinister overtones,
naturally contribute to the picture's momentousness. The subject
had obvious dramatic possibilities, but it is to the skill with which
the highly original composition has been worked out and the in
tense energy with which every smallest feature of it has been painted,
and not the subject itself, to which the picture's impressiveness is due.
I am able to state this categorically, for although I have never visited
Cholesbury I came upon a photograph, which the artist no doubt used
and had preserved among his papers, and this I had an opportunity
of comparing with the painting. The photograph bears the same rela
tion to the painting as its score does to the performance of a symphony.
The second of these pictures is The Roundabout* of 1916 (Plate 20).
In this extraordinary picture the folk-art figures express, although in
a more sophisticated fashion, the brutality that the boisterous jollity
of the traditional Punch scarcely masks. The artist sent a photograph
of it to D. H. Lawrence, whom it moved to admiration and horror.
My dear Gertler [he wrote, in a letter dated 9 October 1916] Your
terrible and beautiful picture has just come. This is the first picture you
have ever painted: it is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is
great and true. But it is horrible and terrifying. I'm not sure I wouldn't
be too frightened to come and look at the original. . . . 3
1 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston. ^ 2 The Ben Uri Gallery, London.
3 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence', edited with an Introduction by Aldous
Huxley, 1932, pp. 368-9.
MARK GERTLER 213
Never again, as far as I am aware, did his folk-art figures assume
so grand or so sinister a form. Indeed the folk-art element in him
usually found expression through subjects- Staffordshire figures and
the like- already perfectly adapted to it.
Gertler had reached maturity as a painter before he was twenty:
the impressive character of his art and his exhilarating personality
combined to make him a considerable figure even before he left the
Slade. In spite of its palpable hyperbole at certain points a description
of him by his friend, the barrister St. John Hutchinson, conveys
something of the effect he made. 'There has seldom been a more
exciting personality than he was when young . . . with amazing gifts
of draughtsmanship, amazing vitality and sense of humour and of
mimicry unique to himself- a shock of hair, the vivid eyes of genius
and consumption. . . , ?1
On leaving the Slade he quickly took his place among the most
gifted of the younger painters. He was immediately elected to
membership of the New English Art Club, and of his Fruit Sorters, 2
which he showed there two years later, Sickert wrote that '. . . the
picture is justified by a sort of intensity and raciness . . . (it) is
important also because it is a masterly piece of painting in well-
supported and consistent illumination, and the work of a colourist
at the same time rich and sober'. 3 He received some commissions for
portraits, too, of which one of the best is Sir George Darwin. 41 As a
draughtsman he had the power of giving weight and dignity and a
kind of rugged tragic character, well exemplified in Head of an Old
Man, 5 of 1912, which, however remote in the order of creation from
Leonardo's heads of old men, has something in common with them.
To his precocious talents as painter and draughtsman were joined
social qualities of the order -though not, perhaps, to the degree -
which St. John Hutchinson claimed for him. It was not long, there
fore, before he became a personality in the intellectual and, more
conspicuously, the bohemian life of London. D. H. Lawrence and
1 Foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition of the Montague Shearman
Collection at the Redfern Gallery, 1940.
2 Whereabouts unknown.
3 'The New English Art Club', 'The New Age', 4 June 1914.
4 The National Portrait Gallery, London.
5 The National Gallery of South Australia* Adelaide, from the collection of the
late Sir Edward Marsh.
214 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Lytton Strachey were numbered among his friends, and he became
a member of the circle which frequented Lady Ottoline MorrelTs
house at Garsington.
Gertler had little of the snob in his composition, and no ambition
to enter fashionable society, although he derived some amusement
from the swiftness of his graduation from Whitechapel tenement to
Mayfair drawing-room. But it was not the drawing-room but the
cafe-in particular the Cafe Royal-that provided the setting in
which he was most at home. The company of writers gave him more
satisfaction than that of painters; he was not deeply interested by
ideas and his acquaintance with literature was superficial, but he
liked to read books by his friends. For a brief period during the First
World War he showed signs of intellectual ambition, but his efforts
at learning and at reading Nietzsche yielded insignificant results.
The sense that everything that the great world offered had
suddenly been made free to him, a slum boy, by his extraordinary
talent he found intoxicating, and he indulged to the full his exorbi
tant sociability-a sociability so exacting, however, that he could be
dull company if alone for long with a single companion. The sudden
enrichment of his life afforded him more excitement and gratifica
tion than happiness. His success did little to diminish his apprehension
that he was and would remain a stranger in this larger world. This
apprehension was not entirely unfounded, but the mistrust and dislike
which he often discovered in those whom he regarded as friends was
due not, as he was inclined to suppose, to social but to personal charac
teristics. Lack of self-control allowed him to sacrifice even considera
tions of prudence for the satisfaction of the moment. If he wished,
for instance, to shine at some social occasion, the ridiculing and
wounding of his closest friends was a price habitually paid without
hesitation or regret. The standards generally observed in the society
he had entered seemed to him as irrelevant to the actual circum
stances of life as the rules of heraldry, and he compared them to their
disadvantage with the less artificial, less complicated standards of
Whitechapel, especially as regards self-assertion, avarice, lust and
the rest. But he never wanted to return to the miserable squalor,
the hysterical quarrels, and above all the want of understanding
of the art that he cared for above everything else, that marked his
early life.
MARK GERTLER 215
It was not long before he had more than a vague sense of isolation
and of insecurity to temper his exuberant enjoyment of his new life:
he became involved in situations in which he inflicted and suffered
distress.
Hard work and what was once charitably described as 'sociability'
before long began to affect his health, and in the summer of 1914
he retired to the windmill home at Cholesbury of his friend Cannan,
which at intervals he revisited. One consequence of these visits was
the splendid portrait, already mentioned, of the novelist by the
painter; the lamentable portrait of the painter by the novelist was
another. This was a novel, published in 1916, entitled 'Mendel', in
which Gertler is the principal character and his life the theme. D. H.
Lawrence wrote of 'Mendel' : 'It is a bad book-statement without
creation-really journalism. Gertler ... has told every detail of his
life to Gilbert- Gilbert has a lawyer's memory and he has put it all
down, and so ridiculously when it comes to the love affair. We never
recognized ourselves. . . / x It is scarcely possible to dissent from
Lawrence's opinion of it. The novel is indeed a shoddy production,
lacking a single spark of creativity; it lacks, too, any value as a record,
so closely is fact intertwined with fiction.
It has always been assumed that the responsibility for this novel
rested entirely with the author. Gertler certainly claimed that he was
unaware that his stories of his life in Whitechapel- which he always
delighted to tell-were being memorized and daily set down by
Cannan without his knowledge. Mr. Balston accepted this dis
claimer. 'Unknown to Gertler/ he wrote, 'Cannan was writing the
novel. . . / 2 An unpublished letter dated 10 May 1916 from Lytton
Strachey, however, makes it virtually certain that Gertler knew that
a novel was being written. *I imagine you may be at Cholesbury/
it runs, 'working hard by day, and talking with Cannan by night.
Is it true that he's writing a novel about you?' This letter shows that
a novel by Cannan based upon Gertler's nightly talks with him was
common talk, and had Gertler, by some extraordinary chance, been
unaware of what was evidently known to others, it would have
appraised him of it. That it reached him may be regarded as certain,
1 'The Letters of D. H. Lawrence*. Letter to Catherine Carswell, 2 December
1916.
2 Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition, 1949-
2l6 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
as it was found among his papers after his death. It is very unlikely,
however, that he ever saw Carman's manuscript.
The description of his visit to my parents' house caused my father
to write to him: 'You wrong both of us by giving so sordid and
untruthful an account of your feelings and mine/ 1 But although it
inflicted a gratuitous wrong upon someone from whom he had
received nothing but disinterested kindness at a time when he stood
in urgent need of it, this description was a small matter compared
with his damaging stories about his own family, stories, however,
that he would tell without the slightest doubt cast on his affection
or his respect for them. And whatever their shortcomings, his
family showed towards him an exemplary loyalty.
The other difficulty in which his temperament involved him was
of a less blameworthy but a more harrowing kind. Among his
friends at the Slade was a girl of exceptional talent. With her he
eventually fell in love, and his relation with her was the most deeply
felt one of his life. The girl was fond of Gertler, but hers was a
complex and highly independent nature, and she was repelled by his
selfishness, which expressed itself in an obsessive desire for complete
possession of her and a reluctance entirely to commit himself. That
harmony between them was impossible so long as Gertler was
obstinately possessive and preoccupied only with himself was
apparent to Lawrence. If you could only give yourself up in love,'
he wrote to Gertler, 'she would be much happier. You always want
to dominate her, which is no good. One must learn to relinquish
oneself, not to bother about oneself, but to love the other person.
You hold too closely to yourself, for her to be free to love you/ 2
In spite of his periodic fits of despair about his work, he was not
self-critical as a man and he could not see the truth of Lawrence's
words. The conclusion to which his own feverish and even hysterical
reflexions led was that the young woman-herself a highly gifted
painter and an acute critic-did not sufficiently respect him as an
artist. This conclusion was almost certainly erroneous. If the value
of his work and his seriousness of purpose could only be authorita
tively impressed upon her, he came to believe, her complicated
reserve would be overcome. The proper person to effect this change
1 Letter found among Gerder's papers.
2 'The Letters of D. H. Lawrence', 20 January 1916.
20. MARK GERTLER. The Roundabout (1916).
Oil, 74$ X 56 In. The Ben Uri Gallery, London.
MARK GERTLER 217
was obviously Lytton Strachey, a man of extraordinary intelligence,
of a manner and aspect wholly unfrivolous, of a temperament which
made it unlikely that he would wish to replace Gertler in her
affections. In August or more probably September 1916 there was a
meeting between her and Strachey. It is probable that nobody knows
what took place. The result, however, was decisive. The girl fell
passionately in love with Strachey, and resolved to devote her life
to his interests, and when he left London to live in the country she
went with him. She was as conscious of his faults as of Gertler's-in
a letter to Gertler written in 1917 she refers to 'Lytton's cynical
frigidity' -but she remained devoted until, years later, she ended her
own life.
The turn of events reduced Gertler to a frenzy of bitterness.
I am afraid [he wrote to her in September 1916] that I cannot support
you over your love for Lytton; because I love you, I need not neces
sarily love what you love. I do believe in you but nothing on earth will
make me believe in Lytton as a fit object for your love- the whole
thing in fact is most disappointing to me. ... I only hope soon that the
nausea of this wretched relationship of yours will poison the spirit of
my love for you and so diminish the stink of it all. Never would I have
contemplated such a nauseous thing. Believe me the whole of these
years of struggle have been turned into ridicule for me by this sudden
reversal of yours to dead withered (undecipherable). Also he arranges
all your life-I must wait with my arrangements for him. Why do you
not at least control yourself a bit, must you be so slavish and abject?
Surely there is in me also something to study, if only my art, you sicken
me with your abject devotion. . . .
The girl's new relationship had an unlooked-for result: instead of
separating her from Gertler it brought them for a time to a closer,
although not a happier intimacy. 'It is not that I don't love you,' she
wrote to him in January 1917. 'It is that I was sad. When one is in
sorrow one feels isolated curiously and to be forced into another's
animal possessions suddenly makes it almost a nightmare/ And the
same month, 'But you must know it is not that I dislike you. It is
something between us, that is hateful.'
In 1915 he left Whitechapel for good, and helped by his family,
who had prospered, he established himself at Penn Studio, Rudall
Crescent, Hampstead, where he remained for fifteen years, lodging
latterly at 19 Worsley Road. Though its effect was not immediately
218 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
apparent, the move corresponded with a change in his art. He
moved away from daily experience of the scenes that had made him
a painter. The two Post-Impressionist exhibitions had caused him,
the least confident of painters, to doubt the validity of his art. A first
visit to Paris, made in 1919, satisfied him that his doubt was justified,
and his art too dependent upon the interest of his subjects and too
little upon purely formal qualities. During the years immediately
following he visited the south of France. In his own eyes, his art,
round about 1920, ceased to be 'provincial' and began to belong to
the tradition forged by Renoir and Cezanne. e He has naturally
chosen work from this latest period since about 1920 to represent
him here/ wrote Mr. Hubert Wellington, in his preface to a small
volume of reproductions of Gertler's works, published in 1925. *It
shows/ the author noted with approval, 'a determination to realize
the form, colour and texture of his subject matter with the greatest
possible completeness. Forms are made full and continuous, local
colour kept rich and undisturbed, . . .' But he found it necessary to
utter a muted warning: '. . . a very personal technique of small
accumulated touches yields very handsome surface qualities and
renders varied textures with an almost disquieting realism: dis
quieting because it tends to obscure the interest in pattern and
"architectural" design.' 1
This discerning critic-even though writing rather more subject
to the then fashionable doctrine of the over-riding importance of
'significant form' than he would to-day-has divined the two con
flicting impulses in Gertler's temperament, the desire, excited by the
example of French painting, to excel in purely aesthetic fields, and a
fascinated interest in the life around him. Of the fundamental
character of the realistic impulse in himself this painter who could
scarcely draw a line but in the presence of his subject was inevitably
aware. 1 have made up my mind,' he wrote to a friend, 'that if I am
to deviate from nature it must be only to add discoveries of my
own. . . .' 2 It need hardly be said that these two impulses are not
necessarily irreconcilable, or that many artists have found the means
to represent the subjects which interest them most deeply in entirely
satisfying aesthetic terms. But this, after he left Whitechapel,
1< Mark Gerder* (British Artists of Today.)
2 From a letter quoted by H. L. Wellington, op. cit.
MARK GERTLER 2Ip
Gertler was rarely able to accomplish. The people and the things
which impressed themselves most deeply upon his imagination were
the people and the things that belonged to his early life. He was
innately and strongly realistic in his way of seeing: he was, in fact,
scarcely capable of envisaging anything that was not before his eyes,
and he worked invariably from his subject direct. 'All his later
landscapes,' we are told by Mr. Balston, 'were done through win
dows/ 1 After he left Whitechapel the subjects that had called forth
his most intense emotion, being no longer before his eyes, faded
from his imagination. They were largely replaced by still-life, the
objects of daily use in his studio or ornaments such as Staffordshire
figures, but unlike Cezanne Gertler was incapable of responding
with his whole mind and his whole heart to a plate of apples.
Generally incapable, would be a juster way of putting it, for from
time to time he painted a still-life of so splendid a quality as to rank
among the finest still-lifes of the century, such, for instance, as the
large Basket of Fruit? of 1925. Nudes he continued to paint with
beauty and conviction until the middle 'twenties. Young Girlhood,
of 1913 3 and of 1925,* are closely observed and taut in handling, but
Sleeping Nude? of 1928, shows a falling off, and worse were to follow.
And all the while, as the memories of his early subjects waned under
the influence of Paris, he became more and more preoccupied with
the search for such purely aesthetic qualities as 'architecture* and
design. The change was not due to a sudden conversion, but to the
steady pressure of such concepts as architecture, significant form and
the like, and the example, of course, of modern French masters, upon
a painter made susceptible to such pressure by the progressive en-
feeblement of his own intensely personal and convinced vision of
things. For a long time something of its former character remained:
he was able, until late in his life, to endow his subjects with a fullness
and warmth that was almost haunting. But as the years passed his
subjects were too often mere counters chosen to exemplify Volume'
or some other fashionable concept, for its own sake. An example-
one, alas, of many-of a subject treated thus is The Mandolinist* of
1934, which has neither more nor less merit than scores of other
1 Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition. 2 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston.
3 Coll. Mr. Edward le Bas. 4 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston.
6 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston. 6 Coll. Mr. Thomas Balston.
220 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
similar paintings made in London and Paris that year by imitators
of Derain and other leading Post-Impressionists.
Gertler was not an intellectual like Duncan Grant or Paul Nash,
still less did he command such powers of thought as Wyndham
Lewis wielded, but he was aware of something amiss with his later
work, and this awareness brought with it recurrent distress of mind.
I do not pretend to know at all precisely how his self-criticism was
directed, but in the absence of conclusive evidence I believe that his
despair sprang from his consciousness of maladjustment between his
failing vision and his growing executive ability. Not that technical
problems ceased to absorb him. Like many other painters he made
notes for his own guidance. One of these, headed 'Latest system and
its advantages' and dated 24 August 1928, tabulates proposed
modifications of method and the results expected. 'Contours more
varied and lost- working right across and not at any stage defined,
advantage-a greater flow and continuation-no stoppage/ reads one
such note. Others of the same date prescribe methods for attaining
'more colour in shadows and more air generally', 'freshness and
light', and presenting the same surface from whichever angle it is
looked at, 'unity and general realizations'. 'Form and design realized
by light and shade seems a deep unalterable characteristic-why try
and alter it?' he reflects. 1
As he grew older the fits of depression from which he had suffered
since boyhood became more desperate, more frequent and pro
longed. To this his recurrent loneliness and the sporadically in
harmonious character of his most intimate relationships contributed,
but their principal occasion was his work. In times of distress he used
to write to friends or set down his thoughts simply for his own
relief. For the light it sheds on his processes of thought and feeling,
above all upon his lack of confidence in himself as an artist, I here
give the whole of what may, perhaps, be the most extensive of his
writings of this nature.
You ask what is the matter with me* "Well it is something serious-
the greatest crisis of my life-and you know what I have already suffered
in the past. In fact-for the time being I see no solution-the trouble is-
my wwfe-what is my value as an artists What have I in me after all?
1 These excerpts have been made from pages of notes found in his studio after
his death.
MARK GERTLER 221
Is there anything there worth while after all? That is the point-I doubt
myself-I doubt myself terribly-after all these years of labour and you
know how I worked-so so hard-with my blood and I have lived and
fed up my work-my work was by faith-my purpose-But-as I find
now to my acute discomfort- an essential part of that faith [and] that
purpose- was not just to work alone-but the hope that I will-some
day- at least produce pictures that will stand that will have some place
among work that counts -Well have I ... achieved anything of the sort
so far? I doubt it very much. Do I stand a chance of succeeding in the
future? That is the point! My doubt on this point is what is causing me
this acute misery. Oh, I cannot tell you how much I suffer-I hardly
dare-My past works keep floating through my mind's eye-awful
ghosts that torture me-I cannot bear to go to a house that contain(s)
any of my pictures-for at once I am flooded with misery and despair!
seeing any good picture or reproduction does the same thing to me-I
feel inferior-inferior to all! . . .-of course I contemplate death- over
and over again- sometimes it even seeming the logical solution-for
you must know-and I frankly confess it- that I cannot live without that
purpose-to create real work-It seems to me that it is either one of two
things-Either I regain sufficient faith for my 'purpose' or I die- . . .
sometimes I think of finding something else to do-but what? To kill
myself- there is the dreadful selfishness of it- think of my mother-
Marjorie and perhaps a few others ! . . . I am putting up a strong fight-I
feel hopeful at times, that there will be a sort of rebirth-a new sort of
adjustment- something I don't know of what nature but I am doing
my best-to treat this dreadful period as a sort of pause-interval-
giving myself the time to be reborn. . , .
*Dec. nth 1929
... A few days after my last note I went down to Leicester Scj. to buy
a revolver-I felt I ought to have one-so that I had in my possession an
easy means of ending my life- when I got near the shop my tongue
went dry with horror-I felt that by getting an 'easy means' I should not
be giving myself a chance -any way I felt cheap and degraded- And I
turned away in disgust-
Today set up a new little still life-Pomegranates in a basket with a
yellow bow. Yes beautiful- and I saw before me my vision. How I see
it and I get a fit of depression-How different to the vision of a Matisse
a Picasso! Ah! those aristocrats! moving so high above me- what a
rough- clumsy peasant they make me feel! What an everyday vision is
mine compared with theirs !
Then I went to tea with my mother- why do I feel so down in the
company of my relations? Oh! How sorry I feel both for them and
myself ... I feel that we are in the same boat really-only I know the
222 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
sort of boat it is-and they don't- and then-How strongly do I feel the
Height of men who really achieve and my own lowness.' 1
In his latter years, more particularly after 1920, gay as he generally
was in company, and happy often when he had a brush in his hand,
he was rarely free for long from the shadows of depression. For in
that year he was seriously ill with tuberculosis and was compelled
to spend five months in. a sanatorium at Banchory; the threat of a
renewal of this trouble sent him into the sanatorium at Mundesley
in Norfolk in 1925, 1929 and 1936. It is clear that ill-health or the
threat of it aggravated his fits of depression. These were eventually
accompanied by suicidal gestures or attempts. On his last visit to
Mundesley he cut his throat and a vein in his arm- then promptly
rang for the nurse.
Gertler's last years provided many occasions for his prevailing
melancholy. In 1930 he married Marjorie Greatorex, daughter of
George Edmund Hodgkinson, a London solicitor, and a son was
born two years later. But the friendship of many had become
hostility or indifference. His ill-health gave increasing cause for
anxiety and, most painful of all, the relative neglect of his work-
though it still held the respect of many painters and lovers of painting
-further increased his painful self-mistrust.
Whether he looked within himself or at the world outside he saw
-or fancied he saw- causes for distress. Not long after I came to the
Tate I remember Sir Edward Marsh's saying to me, in that almost
inaudibly high voice of his, 'I saw Mark last night. He was terribly
depressed. He thinks you don't like his work. I told him you did,
but it was no good.'
During these years he was dependent for pleasure upon social
occasions, when he became for an hour the entertaining prodigy he
had once been. (On one occasion, meeting Charlie Chaplin at an
evening party, the two of them did a comic dance together.) But he
led the most regular- the most monotonous it might almost be said
-of lives. From ten until midday he painted; then until lunch-
which he took alone-he walked. After a rest he painted for a further
hour. For the rest of the day he needed amusements, though even in
1 To whom these pages were addressed is not known to me. They were written
in a 1927 diary and the first part is dated 20 November 1929. Thepages immediately
preceding have been torn out. The diary was found in his studio after his death.
MARK GERTLER 223
the evenings he preferred a regular routine. On Thursdays and
Saturdays he entertained his friends and on Fridays he visited his
family. 'His conversation/ a friend told me, 'was trivial, founded
upon oddments he had read in "The Daily Mail"/ To an old
familiar over long periods he had almost nothing to say, but "one
person to tea and his depression lifted and he was soon up to all his
social tricks'. The flatness of his life was occasionally broken by an
interlude of macabre drama. There was a girl, for instance, who paid
him a visit which he described to a friend in a letter dated 3 Septem
ber 1935: this girl 'who has a passion for me', it runs, 'turned up
when I was alone in the house and proved to be quite mad I lost
my nerve and began to beat and kick her, but she kept returning
through some window. Just like some nightmare . . /
In June 1939 he was more than usually depressed by Hitler's
vilification of Jews and the failure of his exhibition at the Lefevre
Gallery the previous month. One night he swallowed a hundred
aspirins and turned on the gas, but he had left the window open. On
the night of the 22nd he did not forget and the next morning he was
found dead. He was buried in "Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Because
he was Unorthodox, he lay in an unmarked grave, but some
prophetic words from a letter written to him by his friend D. H.
Lawrence will serve as a sort of epitaph for the talent that for a while
shone with so brilliant a light: 'Only take care, or you will burn
your flame so fast, it will suddenly go out. It is all spending and no
getting of strength/
GILBERT SPENCER
b. 1892
^ I 1HE most influential element in the formation of Gilbert
I Spencer as an artist has been his relationship with his brother
JL Stanley. It was Stanley who first encouraged him to be a
painter; it was the heat of Stanley's creative fervour that supplied the
motive power to his beginnings; yet it was Stanley who involved
him in a predicament that remained unresolved over many years of
his life as an artist. Stanley has something of the character of a
force of nature. If every night the fairies were to weave a large area
of canvas and add it to the picture upon which he were at work,
he would cover it with scarcely more awareness of the addition than
a feeling of gratitude. Paintings by him do not end, they are brought
to an end by some material circumstance. The artist's imagination
and his powers of eye and hand do not flag. Likewise his conversa
tion: morning comes or there is a train to be caught, but- except for
a brief rest after lunch-neither the originality of his ideas nor the
sweep or pungency of their expression is affected by the passage of
the hours. Supposing you happen to be the younger brother to such
a force, and you follow the same calling, you may be driven to
become either a disciple or an eccentric or you may be driven to
abandon your calling altogether, but it will be difficult for you to
seek, diligently and with an unruffled mind, the corner of the field
you are best equipped to cultivate. That without ever losing his
reverence for his brother Gilbert Spencer has found his way to such
a corner, and that he cultivates it with sobriety and blitheness of
spirit, is a measure of his quality as a man, a quality that in happy
moments is manifest in his art.
Gilbert Spencer was the ninth and youngest of the Spencer
children and he was born on 4 August 1892 at Fernlea, Cookham-
on-Thames, the house in which all his brothers and sisters were born.
The creative urge, so common in his family, with Gilbert first took
224
GILBERT SPENCER 225
the form of toy-making. Carts were his favourite models, and he
used to go out into the village to study the construction and the
colours of all the carts he could find, carts belonging to his family
and neighbours or strange carts of passage. Of these toys one
example at least, a yellow cart, has been preserved, and it is fine in
workmanship and feeling. It is characteristic of the continuity of his
interests that similar carts are the central feature of his most am
bitious single composition.
While Gilbert briskly hammered and planed, Stanley would bring
branches and twigs into the house, tie the branches on to bedheads,
plant avenues of twigs along the floorboards, and then, imagining
that he had made a forest, would creep and peer among them.
Stanley was not content that Gilbert, making toys, should forego
the deeper, more various satisfactions that painting affords, and he
persuaded him to share his vocation. 'Stanley had become a real
painter before I began: he showed me painting, held it up for me to
see, then he handed it to me on a plate/ Gilbert told me. *I was
attracted by it, but if it hadn't been for him, I might have gone on
simply wondering about it.' The moment of revelation came when
Stanley brought back from the Slade a book on Masaccio, in a
popular series on the old masters, and showed him The Tribute
Money. Another moment of revelation followed when he heard
Bach's 'St. Mathew Passion' in St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.
These moments showed him that he could not be content with
making toys.
Gilbert Spencer received his general education at the Ruskin
School at Maidenhead which he attended from 1909 until 1911. The
following year he spent at the art school at Camberwell, and the
year after that learning wood-carving at the South Kensington
Schools. When it was decided that he should become a painter he
went to the Slade, remaining there from the autumn of 1913 until
the Spring of 1915. Being able to afford only three days a week at the
school, he spent the other four painting on his own at Cookham.
At the Slade he made quick progress. He won a first prize for
figure drawing, Professor Brown's prize for the drawing of the head,
and he shared the Summer Composition prize in 1914 with T. T.
Baxter, a fellow student. The subject, Summer, 1 painted at Cookham,
1 The Slade School, University College, London.
226 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
has a clumsy, archaic look, from which something lyrical shines out
incongruously. His narrow missing of the Summer Composition
prize the previous year led to his first becoming known outside the
Slade. The painting submitted, The Seven Ages of Man* was a large
work also painted at Cookham, which, in spite of the rawness of the
handling and the awkwardness of many passages, has intimations of
something noble and impressive. The picture was seen and admired
by a new friend, Henry Lamb, who, with another painter Darsie
Japp, had visited him in Cookham not long before. Lamb asked
whether Gilbert Spencer was willing to sell it: the painter was
walling and the price asked .20. 'Do you object/ Lamb asked him
shortly afterwards, 'to having 100?' The buyer was Lady Ottoline
Morrell, a friend and patron of Lamb's, as of the most gifted of a
generation of painters and writers. She bought it for the Con
temporary Art Society. This triumph was naturally the talk of the
Slade. When Tonks next went round the studios, Gilbert Spencer
awaited his approach with modest complacency, which, however,
the demeanour of his master soon dispelled. Stopping abruptly at a
distance, he said, 'So youVe sold your picture, have you? Early
success invariably leads to ruin/ and turned his back. The incident
did not alter Tonks's encouraging disposition towards his successful
student. This picture, remarkable to my thinking in spite of its
manifold faults and crudities, is still, after more than forty years,
without a permanent home. In 1933, "when I was its Director, I
secured its acceptance by the City Art Gallery at Leeds, but I left
soon afterwards, when it was exchanged for Shepherds Amazed, of
1920, a maturer work by the same artist, but one which was painted
somewhat under the spell of his brother's Biblical pictures.
The Seven Ages of Man, although the most ambitious of the
pictures he painted before the First World War, does not stand alone
in announcing a new painter of unusual talent. An unfinished Self
Portrait* painted in Cookham in 1914, a bold and assured study,
owing little to the work of any other painter, is strongly marked by
the quality of genuineness -the word is a vague one but I will try to
justify its use in this context presently-that distinguishes the best
works of Gilbert Spencer.
1 The Contemporary Art Society, London.
2 The City Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent.
GILBERT SPENCER 227
In May 1915 the artist enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps
and later transferred to the 2/22 London Regiment, with which he
served in the Middle East. On active service he made a number of
studies-one of which, representing a ward in the stationary hospital
at Mahemdia, Sinai, formed the basis of his large painting, New
Arrivals* of 1919 -but his war experience made no significant
addition to his experience as an artist. His mind was fixed upon the
country round his home. There exists a Cookham landscape Sashes
Meadow, 2 which spans the war, for it was begun and largely com
pleted in August 1914, but the large tree on the right was not put in
until just after his demobilization in 1919. The contrast that this
picture offers between the sombreness of wood and field and the
silvery luminosity of rippling water puts one in mind of contrasts
of the same kind in the work of Constable. This small picture is a
work of dignity and authority and one of the finest of the painter's
early landscapes.
The consequence of renewed association with his brother Stanley
was that he painted several Biblical subjects, of which the most
impressive is The Sermon on the Mount* of 1921-2, a large picture
showing an assembly of bearded, white-robed figures (the one
seated in the right foreground appears to represent Augustus John)
of a massive amplitude. It has dignity and purity of feeling and must
count among the serious religious paintings made in England
between the wars. But religious painting, with the exception of
Stanley Spencer's wall-paintings at Burghclere and a very few other
works, was not upon a high level. The Sermon on the Mount falls short
not on account of its archaism (the rocks, for instance, are the rocks
of Italian painting), but because the painter is without deep religious
insight. The scene conveys no hint of the giving of a momentous
message; it represents nothing but an assembly of prophetic-looking
elderly men, almost identically wigged and bearded, in vaguely
monastic garments. Nothing in the design leads the eye towards the
Saviour. As an exercise in religious painting it is worthy of praise,
but it is not religious painting; and in any case the painter, never so
religious as Stanley, was losing his faith at the time he was engaged
upon this picture. Fearful of a cynical conformity, a man as honest
1 The Imperial War Museum, London.
2 The Tate Gallery, London. 3 Coll. the artist.
228 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
and as positive as Gilbert Spencer recognizes his loss, when he feels
his faith ebbing away, and after about 1923 he confessed himself an
agnostic.
I'm a horizontalist, [he once said to me, discussing this topic] and
Stanley's a verticalist. I don't believe I was ever truly religious, but for
a time Stanley was able to impart his religious sense to me, partly by
his words, pardy by paintings like The Visitation and Zacharias and
Elizabeth. But I rarely had much to do with the deeper levels -religion
and philosophy-I just loved painting and he was the painter I admired
most; so painting was the real link between us.
The Spencers, you know, contrary to what many people think, were
not a religious family. We went to Chapel-until the old chapel was
replaced by a new one, which made bad blood with our family -and
then to church. No blasphemy was allowed, but my father used often
to say 'Christ was a man, like anybody else*. But it was the preachers in
the Chapel who inspired so many of Stanley's figures, which are all
portraits of a kind, you know. I can recognize their likenesses.
Landscape, not figure painting, has been the principal business of
Gilbert Spencer's life, although he has painted a few fine portraits
and made a long series of portrait drawings of remarkable beauty.
His first one-man exhibition in January 1923 at the Goupil Gallery
was received with mild interest by the critics but little more. 'Both
(Spencer) brothers,' wrote Frank Rutter, usually responsive to
serious new talent, 'in my opinion have done some very good work,
and have also painted some foolish, affected pictures; therefore, I
have been inclined to sit on the fence.' 1 He slipped offit so cautiously
that it is a little difficult to see at this distance upon which side he
came down. The landscapes were praised, as also some of the
drawings; the figure compositions, more especially The Seven Ages
of Man, were ridiculed. 'The Times' was amiable but uncommitted;
the warmest praise came from 'The Daily Mail'. By painters and
collectors, however, the exhibition was warmly welcomed. My
father had bought a landscape from the Grosvenor Gallery the year
before, and presently Gilbert Spencer himself appeared at our
house, an irrepressibly gay and breezy presence: sartorially, com
pared with his brother Stanley, a dandy; compared with anyone
else, a tramp.
Gilbert Spencer's landscapes have been made mostly in the
1 'The Sunday Times', 7 January 1923.
GILBERT SPENCER 229
Thames valley, in his native Berkshire; in and around the Oxford
shire villages of Garsington and Little Milton where he spent the
years 1925 until 1928; but also in Dorset and, during the Second
World "War, in the Lake District. In 1931 he bought Tree Cottage,
at Upper Basildon, Berkshire, to which, in spite of enforced wander
ings, he has constantly returned. These landscapes are of two kinds:
pictures of particular places, which are begun and completed in front
of the subject, and compositions which are not pure inventions but
assemblies of features brought together from particular neighbour
hoods. The first are by far the more numerous. 'Stanley's painting
could be judged from a small group of masterpieces/ the artist
observed, 'mine is like a chain with a lot of small links.' There is much
truth in this modest comparison, especially in so far as it refers to the
realistic landscapes. The series is long, the standard high, but while it
includes many pictures of great beauty it includes none, I think,
which by itself shows the full stature of the artist. Besides Sashes
Meadow, Emmer Green, 1 and Garsington Village, 2 both of 1924, Home
Close, Garsington* of 1924, Stow Valley, 41 of 1927, Little Milton, 5
Burdens* both of 1933, From my studio, 1 of about 1949, all afford
intimations of that genuineness referred to a few lines above. By
genuineness I mean that nothing, no line, no brushstroke, is set down
except as the immediate response to perception or to feeling. This
quality is rarer than may be supposed. Some painters, when per
ception or feeling fails them, carry on as though nothing is amiss,
and thereby practise a deception; others, impelled by a sense of duty,
paint stubbornly on when they neither perceive nor feel, in the hope
that the act of painting will restore them. Others again rely on a style
that has won approval to disguise their want of anything to com
municate. Gilbert Spencer sets down nothing not fully experienced,
so that his series of landscapes is a precious record of the response to
landscape of a warm and constant love of the English country. Since
he first began to paint, the artist's view of things has undergone few
changes and only one that need be mentioned in so brief a study.
When he began, his brother, Masaccio and other early Florentines
were his masters: his style was linear; his colour, radiant but
1 Coll. Sir Gerald Kelly. * The Contemporary Art Society, London.
3 Whereabouts unknown. 4 The Fine Art Society, London.
6 The City Art Gallery, Belfast. 6 Whereabouts unknown. 7 Coll. the Artist.
230 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
subdued, ministered to his drawn shapes with dignified subservience.
Very slowly, at times scarcely perceptibly, a transforming idea
asserted itself: the idea of colour's existing not as subservient to form
but as a part of it. The idea came to him from the most obvious
source. 1 always loved the French Impressionists,' he said, speaking
to me of his debt to them, 'they were a lovely crowd, particularly
Pissarro, and Cezanne as well. I look at a Michelangelo and I marvel;
I look at a Pissarro and I somehow share it. I owe it to them that my
aims, as I've gone along, have emerged, more and more definitely,
as light and tone and atmosphere.'
Different aims called for different methods. The early landscapes
were painted over meticulous drawings, made direct upon the
canvas. Summary indications as to form and colour, notes, have
gradually taken the place of meticulous drawings, and have enabled
him to attain to a greater freedom of handling. All these processes
have invariably been carried out in front of the subject. When I
questioned him upon this matter, he said, 1 have occasionally put in
a bit of extra grass. But I haven't really got any method,' he added.
*I start everything I do from scratch, and I never believe I can do
anything until I've done it.' In these landscapes done from nature he
never deliberately alters any feature of the scene before him. 'You
see me moving around, in search of the best viewpoint, but you don't
see me moving trees around,' he said. 'My imaginary things are
entirely imaginary. I couldn't imagine something in a real place.'
The landscape compositions, of which a good example is A
Memory of Whithall, Gloucestershire, 1 of 1948, are less successful than
those made directly from nature. The absence of nature tends to
weaken his conviction, or rather the partial absence of nature. In the
landscape composition he uses drawings made from nature; his
imagination shows itself stronger when it has no prop. Of greater
merit than his landscape compositions are his figure compositions.
Of these, with The Sermon on the Mount , far the finest is A Cotswold
Farm 2 (Plate 21), painted during 1930 and 1931 from studies made
in the Cotswolds. It represents no particular place, but many of the
studies were made at Andoversford, at a farm belonging to Dr.
Austin Lane Poole, President of St. John's College, Oxford. The
landscape in works of this kind differs radically from that in the
1 Coll. the Artist. 2 The Tate Gallery, London,
GILBERT SPENCER 23!
landscape compositions, for it is designed, the artist told me 'not so
much as an end in itself, as to fit the people'.
Neither his temperament-an essentially plein aireist temperament,
happiest in the presence of nature-nor his brief professional training
equips him for composition on a large scale; in any case it is a rare
faculty in these times when there is little demand for monumental
public painting. The immense pains he gave himself in working out,
in a long series of studies, the composition of A Cotswold Farm
enabled him to overcome his handicap to a considerable extent, and
although at points it falls short of academic perfection it is an
impressive picture and one which it is not easy to forget. Although
its themes are taken from the Cotswolds rather than the Thames
valley, it constitutes almost a repertory of the themes of Gilbert
Spencer's art: the farm buildings, the ploughed fields, the labourers,
above all the carts, are all there-and even the grove-crowned hill is
reminiscent of Berkshire rather than of the Cotswolds. If the com
position has had to be struggled for, the innumerable details have
been put in with familiar ease: the whole crowded, indeed over
crowded, assembly of facts is knit together not mainly by the
composition but by a warm consistency of feeling into a coherent
whole in which interest is combined with dignity and transparent
candour. The picture enhanced his professional reputation and won
a wide popularity as soon as it was shown in February 1932 at an
exhibition of his paintings and drawings at the Goupil Gallery. 'The
Times' described it as 'a sort of rustic equivalent of Madox Brown's
Work'? Frank Rutter as 'a great painting'; 2 'The Morning Post',
whose critic was in general reluctant to see merit in the less con
ventional artists, as 'a magnificent achievement'; 3 while to 'The
Scotsman' it was 'one of the liveliest compositions of recent years,
and should find a place in the Tate Gallery' 4 -in which it indeed
found a place before February was out. A Cotswold Farm lives with
a greater fullness than Hebridean Memory, 3 of 1948-54, an equally
ambitious composition based upon studies made on the Island of
Canna, which he visited during his residence in Glasgow from 1948
until 1950 as head of the Department of Painting and Drawing at
the College of Art.
1 6 February. 2 'The Sunday Times', 14 February.
8 9 February. 4 6 February. 5 Coll. the Artist.
232 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Allied to these two large compositions are the wall-paintings in
Holywell Manor, Oxford, an annexe to Balliol, which the painter
began in 1934 and completed two years later. These paintings extend
in a continuous band of about seven feet in height round the upper
part of the four walls of the ante-room to the Junior Common
Room, a room about fifteen feet square. They are in oil upon a
prepared plaster surface. The foundation of Balliol College is the
legend which the paintings illustrate- briefly, that John Balliol,
intent upon seizing lands belonging to the Bishop of Durham,
ambushed him when he was crossing a ford. For this offence he was
arrested, tied to a tree and thrashed. Dervorguilla his wife, consider
ing that he had got off too lightly, gave money to enable sixteen
poor students to study at Oxford. A wit said at the time that the
painter's treatment of it was Chaucerian rather than Spenserian.
There is some truth in this observation, for the drama is played out
in a spirit of gentle rustic humour. At first glance the painter's inter
pretation seems rather too rustic, the actors to have too uniformly
the character and the tempo of agricultural labourers, but closer
scrutiny discovers subtleties not at once apparent. Of these the most
moving is the way in which the scholars' dedication to learning is
expressed in their manifest joy in their first distant sight of Oxford,
and in the intentness with which, having reached it, they peruse the
books in the chained library, and the eagerness with which their up
raised hands flutter along the shelves. The landscape background is
continuous, the earlier panels showing the craggy character of the
Border country-where the painter has had recourse to the Italian
primitives -the later the undulating character of Oxfordshire where
he has no need to look beyond his own memories. The painter has
responded finely to Balliol's imaginative commission.
One further field of his activity remains to be mentioned, namely
portraiture, which he has pursued intermittently from his student
days down to the present. The best of the portraits in oils known to
me are Portrait of a Man* Reading Boy, 2 both of 1922, Professor Oliver
de Selincourt* of 1953, The Artist's Wife* of 1954. The first is a
powerful, archaic-looking full length, in which the painter's delight
in homely objects is almost as manifest in his treatment of the black
1 The Southampton Art Gallery. 2 Coll. the Artist.
3 Coll. Professor Oliver de Selincourt. 4 Coll. the Artist.
5 ej
(3
GILBERT SPENCER 233
iron cottage stove before which his subject is seated as in the cloth-
capped, heavily moustached figure itself. The other three are
notable for the quality of the insight into character that they show-
an insight in which remorseless candour is tempered by the warmest
affection-and for the fineness of the heads' construction. But nothing
that the artist has done is finer, to my thinking, than the best of his
portrait drawings, and these best are numerous. In them line defines
form in its plenitude, form perfectly expressive of the character of
the subject. To name but a few, almost at random: French G/r/, 1
of 1920, Dorset Gir/, 2 of 1921, Little Girl in Spectacles* of 1922, and
Mabel Nash* of 1923, Mrs. Keep, 5 of 1930, and Hebridean* of 1947.
These are drawings that could hang in any company.
When Gilbert Spencer was a young painter the novelty of his
work, with its engaging blend of simplicity and skill, won him a
place among the leaders of his generation. For some years, without
loss of respect, his work has been first taken for granted, and then
overlooked. I think that the sober genuineness of which I have
written, and the charm which springs from the irrepressible gaiety
of the painter, will enable the best of it to survive the coming holo
caust of reputations.
1 CoU. Mr. J. L. Behrend. 2 Coll. Mr. Henry Lamb.
3 Coll. Mr. Cyril Mahoney.
4 The City Art Gallery, Manchester (Rutherston Coll.).
5 The City Art Gallery, Manchester (Rutherston Coll.),
6 Coll. the Artist.
JOHN NASH
b. 1893
BIOGRAPHIES of landscape painters often convey the im
pression that nature was their subject's inspiration and that
their art was founded upon the study of landscape itself. The
art of most landscape painters, like that of most painters in fact,
derives principally from the example of other painters.
Landscape, especially landscape undisciplined by man, opposes
particular difficulties to painting. Confronted by nature, as it
stretches away to the horizon in every direction in infinite com
plexity, the untaught eye is baffled. Whether it contemplates the
scale of nature as it stretches away to the infinitely vast in the one
direction or the infinitely minute in the other, it faces the baffling
problem of giving order and a finite form to a phenomenon which
in its infinite complexity has neither-neither, at all events, dis
cernible to the untaught eye. Most artists, before they can look
profitably at landscape, must first learn what to look for by reference,
conscious or not, to the work of other artists. Their human experi
ence may offer them some guidance where a human face or body is
in question, but guidance of a more specialized kind is necessary if
they are not to be altogether lost in the contemplation of the intricate
disorder and the immensity of nature. Reason alone would suggest
that this could hardly be otherwise; the landscape paintings of the
period with which these pages are concerned tend to confirm it.
These seem to me to reveal, to a greater degree than portraits or
still-lifes, say, reliance upon art rather than nature. All painters, what
ever their pretensions to innovation, draw largely upon the experi
ence of their predecessors, but a glance at an assemblage of modern
landscape paintings is a particularly forcible reminder of how frankly
their makers have taken either Constable, or Turner, or the Barbizon
School, or the Impressionists, or Cezanne or his followers, if not in
variably as models, then almost invariably as a point of departure. The
very intractability of landscape as a subject would seem to demand
a rather closer-knit tradition than subjects smaller and less various.
234
JOHN NASH 235
Of the subjects of these essays who have directed their chief efforts
towards landscape all have looked harder in the earlier part of their
lives as painters at art than they have at nature-with the exception
of John Nash, the present subject.
There is nothing spectacular, nothing even strikingly personal,
about his landscape because the personality of the painter is quiet,
reticent and serene; but it owes little to the example of others, for
John Nash seldom looks at a painting and pays no attention to
theories: he reads little about painting, and as a subject for reflexion
takes no interest in it at all. The example of his friends is certainly
discernible in his beginnings; so inevitably is something of the climate
of the time in which he grew up, but the real source of his landscape
painting, to a degree for which I can think of no parallel among his
contemporaries, is landscape itself. John Nash lives in the country;
he is an impassioned gardener and botanist and a life-long and
single-minded lover of landscape.
^> o o
The principal facts of his uneventful life are soon told. John
Northcote Nash was born at Ghuznee Lodge, Earl's Court, on
ii April 1893, the younger of the two sons (Paul being the elder) of
William Harry Nash, and educated at Langley Place, Slough, and at
Wellington College. He left school without definite ideas about how
to spend his life, but was willing to try any kind of work. The
possibility of his entering a solicitor's office was considered, but his
father found it difficult to provide the necessary premium. Even
tually he joined, as an apprentice, the staff of 'The Middlesex &
Bucks Reporter'. Finding that his activities as a reporter were cir
cumscribed by lack of transport, he asked for sufficient money to
buy a bicycle. For this importunity he was reprimanded and given
notice; his career in journalism was at an end, and he was without
occupation or prospects.
Casting about what his brother had best do, Paul urged him to
try his hand at painting.
I must have been a very malleable character [John Nash once said to
me] for I'd never' thought of being a painter, but I at once agreed, and
set about making landscapes in water-colour and comic drawings. Paul
was not happy at the Slade and he opposed my going there or to any
236 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
school of art, and he used, to tell me how lucky I was to begin free from
the disadvantages of conventional training. All the same, [he added] I
wish I'd had the advantage of training of some kind.
Paul had sent a packet of John's drawings to his friend Gordon
Bottomley, who wrote, on 7 July 1912, that:
he has not only a good sense of decorative disposition of his masses,
but his blacks have a beautiful quality, and his pen-touch is crisp and
clear and delicate and exquisitely balanced. ... In facility and lucidity
and directness of expression, and in his faculty of keeping his material
untroubled, he has advantages over you; but of course it remains to be
seen if he can preserve these qualities when he has as much to say as you
have. 1
Paul's informative reply, written about 13 July, shows John as a very
tentative beginner both as a draughtsman (the spirited comic draw
ings with which he had illustrated his letters from Wellington had
delighted his family) and as a writer.
Jack is very 'set up for the rest of 'is natural' as the vulgar have it, [runs
the letter] upon your high praise-I don't mean he has swollen his head
piece for he ever expresses a mild surprise at any appreciation upon his
drawings, which he does at odd times on odd bits of paper when he has
nothing else to do. I, from time to time, raid his desk or the waste-
paper basket or the corners of the room & collect the odd bits of paper
rather like a park-keeper in Kensington Gardens, and after a sorting
of chaff from grain tho' to be sure it's all 'chaff ' I select the best & cut
them into a decent shape & mount them. At first Jack used to be so
delighted at the good appearance of his drawings when mounted that
he fully believed it was entirely owing to the way I set them up &
drew lines round them; gradually it has dawned on him tho' that it
must be he has done a good drawing -this is a pity because he now
becomes a little too conscious & careful, with the result his designs
are not so naive & simple. At present he is working on the staff of a
country paper & gaining experience for a journalistic career. All his
abilities ue in that direction and he will tell you his ambition is to be
*a man of letters'. These drawings are as yet his only expression of him
self. He is very observant and writes excellent descriptions of things
that strike him, always with the same quaint touch you see in these
designs. He has so far done very little actual writing save a few articles
in the paper & some essays when he was at Wellington. The work for
the paper takes all his time & he is riding about & reporting all
1 'Poet and Painter, being the correspondence between Gordon Bottomley and
Paul Nash, 1910-1946*, p. 38.
22. JOHN NASH. The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble (1922).
Oil, 30 X 20 in. The Tate Gallery, London.
JOHN NASH 237
over the county & at all times of day & night. Unfortunately his
time is up in August for this has been experience & work quite unpaid
as regards salary, and then I really don't know what happens -a
London paper I suppose is the next thing-he likes regular work &
routine, unlike me, & works well; at the same time he is not con
stitutionally robust & v. hard work in London would not be good for
him I fear. I myself have no doubt he has a most interesting self to
develop, & work to produce, but how & in what direction I really
am not certain. 1
A curious encounter I had, years later, with Paul leads me to think
that the doubts he voiced to Bottomley about 'how and in what
direction' his brother should express himself still persisted, in spite
of the blossoming of John's powers.
Just before the Second World War I was commissioned to write
an introductory essay on John Nash for a portfolio of reproductions
(which was not published) similar to one that had recently appeared
on Paul. 2 When I had completed the essay I told Paul that I would
value highly any comments he might care to make on it, and he
accordingly invited my wife and myself to lunch. After I had read
the essay aloud to him, he said, with deliberation, *It was I who
encouraged Jack to be a painter; and I'm still not sure that I did
rightly: I don't know whether he has a painter's imagination.' These
words astonished me, and I might have doubted having heard them,
although they were several times repeated in slightly differing form,
had my wife not heard them also.
Not much more than a year after John Nash began his series of
landscapes the brothers held a joint exhibition at the small and long
defunct Dorien Leigh Galleries in Pelham Street, South Kensington,
and its success confirmed him in his choice of a vocation. The
exhibition was a success, not only on account of the number of works
sold, but of the favourable impression it made among painters.
Among the painters who went to see it were Oilman, Bevan,
Sickert, as well as my father, who had known Paul-as a Slade
student Paul used occasionally to show him John's satirical drawings
of suburban life-since 1910. As a consequence of the success of the
exhibition, and of the acceptance, also in 1913, of a water-colour by
1 Ibid., p. 39-
2 'Paul Nash', a portfolio of colour plates, with an introduction by Herbert
Read, 1937,
238 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the New English Art Club -a success which resounded far more
influentially than it would to-day-John Nash was drawn for a brief
period into one of the vortices of London's art world. He accepted
in 1914 an invitation to become a member of the newly founded
London Group, and the following year, on Oilman's invitation, he
joined the Cumberland Market Group, and he became associated
with the young painters who used to foregather at 19 Fitzroy Street.
It is significant, however, of his essential detachment from the
curious, turbulent little world which revolved about these groups
that he did not dream, as he told me, 'of visiting the Second Post-
Impressionist Exhibition, which was held while I was constantly in
London'.
The first visit he paid to 19 Fitzroy Street he recalls with a particu
lar vividness. The spectacle of such an assemblage-seen on arrival
through the studio door-Pissarro, Gilman and Gore were present-
so overawed him that he had turned to descend the stairs when Gore,
watchful and genial, hailed him and drew him inside. This occasion,
he thinks, was when he first met Gilman, who began on the spot to
impart to him his theories about painting. It was then that Gilman
uttered a warning, often repeated, against the mixing of paint with
oil: 'There's enough oil in the paint anyhow, without adding more
of the treacherous stuff.' John Nash heeded the warning, and like
Gilman and his friends Ginner and Bevan he never diluted his paint
with oil. There was a further and more important respect in which
the teaching of Gilman affected the methods of John Nash; he urged
him not to make his paintings from nature but from drawings. This
injunction he has mostly followed partly owing to the force of Gil-
man's argument, but partly because he finds it difficult to carry his
landscapes in oils to completion directly from nature. These, with
few exceptions, are therefore painted in the studio from drawings
made on the spot; his water-colours are carried far towards com
pletion in front of the subject, but worked on afterwards indoors.
Gilman's advice carried particular weight with John Nash, as he had
been painting in oils for only about a year before his first meeting
with him early in 1915. The two previous years he had spent in
making landscapes in water-colour round his home in Buckingham
shire and in Berkshire, Norfolk and Dorset. In May 1915 he joined
with Gilman and two other members of the Cumberland Market
JOHN NASH 239
Group -Ginner and Sevan-in an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery.
A water-colour, Trees in a Flood, was presented that same year to the
City Art Gallery, Leeds, by Sir Michael Sadler, one of his earliest
admirers. It was the first of his works to enter a public collection.
In spite of his fruitful and pleasurable London associations -he
enjoyed in particular the weekly meetings Tor tea and picture
showing' held by the Cumberland Market Group in Sevan's house
overlooking the market- the true centre of his life, then and at all
times, was the country. In view of the intimate association between
his painting and the places he has lived in, it seems to me that there
is little in an account of his life more relevant than the record of these
places. From 1901, when his family moved from Kensington into
Buckinghamshire, until the First World War, he lived at home at
Iver Heath. After serving in the Ministry of Munitions, in the 28th
London Regiment, Artists' Rifles, with whom he was on active
service in France from November 1916 until January 1918, and in
the spring of that year, as an Official War Artist, he lived at Chal-
font Common, Buckinghamshire. In the autumn of the following
year he settled in Gerrards Cross, but spending that summer at not
far distant Whiteleaf, Princes Risborough, and the following at
Sapperton, Gloucestershire. In 1921, while looking for a house to
buy, he went to Monks Risborough, establishing himself at Meadle,
near Princes Risborough, where except for summer painting excur
sions he remained until the second year of the Second World War,
All these places except Sapperton were in Buckinghamshire. In the
autumn of 1944 he took Bottengoms Farm, at Wormingford in
Essex, where he now lives.
Considering that he was without formal training of any kind and
that the First World War disrupted his life and work before he was
able to establish himself, John Nash's growth to maturity was
extremely rapid. His water-colours were marked by an assurance
and a sense of style almost from the start: Landscape near Sheringham, 1
for instance, was probably made on a visit to Norfolk in 1912 with
an artist friend, when he decided to devote himself to painting.
With his oils it was otherwise. For two or three years his under
standing of method was so elementary that at first glance his earliest
paintings have a look of conscious archaism, an uncandid simplicity;
1 Private Coll.
240 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
only upon close examination is it apparent that they are expressions
of a mind with a personal sensibility and inventiveness struggling for
clarity and fullness of statement. I have in mind such paintings as
Threshing* of 1914, in which the painter has been vividly aware of
the relations between the ascending member of the machine, the
twisting column of smoke, the woods behind and the cloudy sky
above, yet been painfully unable to give these relations a logical and
fully expressive coherence. Yet these and other paintings of the same
unsophisticated character found a warm response among several
lovers of painting. 'His railway viaduct 2 also and the wood of slim
trees 3 are most beautiful/ wrote Gordon Bottomley to Paul Nash 4
(n June 1919); the first of these pictures promptly found a place in
the collection of Sir Osbert Sitwell, and I recall my father's constant
praise of the works of both brothers.
The struggles with his medium of this untaught, untravelled
painter were rewarded with a success which came quickly. In 1918
he painted The Cornfield, a picture in which strength of construction
is united with an exhilarating rhythmic harmony. A Buckingham
shire field and its bounding woods are here realized simply and
grandly, all detail merged in a large glowing unity- a vision so
direct and solid and so burning that, sharing it in the presence of this
picture, it affects one as the work of some humble primitive master.
This remarkable painting was bought by Sir Edward Marsh, who
early befriended the two brothers, and I remember with what
dignity it held its place, year by year, on the walls, ever more
densely crowded with the works of young contemporaries, of 5
Raymond Buildings, his chambers in Gray's Inn, and how much it
continued to delight him. He made a gift of it to Ivor Novello, his
most intimate friend, on condition that he bequeathed it, through
the Contemporary Art Society, to the Tate Gallery. It entered the
collection in this way after his death in 1952.
Early in 1918 John Nash was commissioned as an Official War
Artist to make paintings and drawings of war subjects for the
Ministry of Information, with which he was occupied for the larger
part of that year and the next. During this time he shared a shed
which served as a studio with his brother at Chalfont Common.
1 Coll. Mr. de G. Sieveking. 2 "Whereabouts unknown.
3 Whereabouts unknown. 4 Op. cit., p. 108.
JOHN NASH 24.1
Paul wrote a spirited description to Gordon Bottomley of the life
which the brothers led there:
"We have taken a large shed, formerly used for drying herbs. It is a
roomy place with large windows down both sides, an ample studio -
here we work. Jack is lately married-a charming girl whom we all
adore. . . . They live in rooms in a little house next the shed & Bunty
and I have a room in the old farm -a charming place with a wonderful
cherry orchard & fine old barns & sheep and rabbits & all that sort
of thing. We all lunch together in the studio where there is a piano
so our wives enchant us with music at times thro' the day. A phantastic
existence as all lives seem these days but good while it lasts & should
produce something worth while I suppose. France and the trenches
would be a mere dream if our minds were not perpetually bent upon
those scenes. 1
While he was on active service in France John Nash had made
numerous sketches, from which he was able to execute his various
commissions. Of these the most ambitious was a large, six feet by
seven, painting, Oppy Wood, Evening, 1917? completed in 1919.
Neither for dramatic intensity nor for insight into the war does this
picture compare with the best of the war pictures of Paul Nash. In
Oppy Wood, Evening, the quiet, modest, peaceful man, the gardener,
the botanist, has taken as his theme a moment when war has receded.
The earth in front of the trench is shell pitted, the blasted trees have
no branches, yet a great quiet has taken possession of the scene, a
quiet so potent as to still even the sound of the two shells exploding
away on the left, a quiet that is the harbinger of a larger quiet that
will eventually still the voices of the guns and in which nations will
be reconciled, and sanity come again, and gardening and botany
resume their proper places among the pursuits of men. Such, more
or less, are the sentiments which have gone to the formation of
Oppy Wood, Evening. Like many of the best works of the Official
War Artists (as of the best artists who have represented war) this is
not a war but a peace picture. John Nash also painted some war
pictures in the most positive sense. One of the best of these, Over the
Top: The 1st Artists Rifles at Marcoing* also painted during 1918-19,
shows men of the regiment in which he served climbing out of their
1 Op. cit, p. 99. 2 The Imperial War Museum, London.
3 The Imperial War Museum, London; there is a replica in the Headquarters of
the Artists' Rifles.
242 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
trench and walking, heads down, into the smoke of the barrage.
The slow upward and forward movement is powerfully conveyed;
so too the tension between fear and determination in the advancing
men. The dramatic moment, and death itself, though represented
with a fitting sombreness, are represented without even a hint of
melodrama, but in due proportion to the drama as a whole. While
he was engaged upon these two important pictures, the War Office
having neglected to inform his regiment of his appointment as an
Official War Artist, he was posted as a deserter, and an escort sent
to apprehend him.
With The Cornfield and the war pictures his apprenticeship was
ended: the primitive look disappeared from his art and he painted
with a modest consciousness of command. I have the impression -
which in the absence of a fully representative retrospective exhibition
I have not been able to confirm-that in spite of these auspicious
beginnings as a mature painter in oils John Nash has succeeded more
often in conveying in water-colour his special insights into nature.
This may be due to the circumstance that his art is primarily an art
of observation and selection, the child of a creative impulse roused
to its highest pitch by the presence, rather than by the subsequent
contemplation, of the subject. The relative laboriousness of painting
in oils, the degree of organization which it demands, offers a hard
choice to those who employ it in the representation of landscape.
They may complete their pictures in front of the subject and run the
risk of being 'put out by nature', of being distracted by the subject
from the work of art, of being prevented by changing light, by wind
and other difficulties attendant on working outdoors, from giving
to the work itself the intense concentration which for most painters
is possible only in the studio. Or they may take them away from the
subject to complete indoors, and thereby run the risk attendant upon
being cut off from the source of their inspiration. As related earlier,
John Nash occasionally begins his oils in front of the subject, carries
them as far as he can, and takes them indoors for completion, but
more usually he paints them entirely in the studio. To a man as
immediately dependent as he is in his landscapes upon the heightened
feelings he derives from the sight of field and wood, the smell of
ploughed earth and corn under a hot sun, the deprivation of such
impression accounts, it seems to me, for a listlessness, a fluffy
JOHN NASH 243
indeterminacy sometimes noticeable in his landscapes in oils but in
relatively few of those in water-colour. The lighter medium allows
him to complete pictures in the full enjoyment of the impressions
that furnish the motive power of his art, so that in his water-colours
signs of waning interest, signs of attempts to rely instead upon sense
of duty, are rarely to be seen.
But John Nash's occasional proneness to boredom in his oils
should not cause us to forget that in every one of the places where he
has lived he has interpreted the landscape, and in every season of the
year (although it is winter, I think, that most often calls forth his
highest faculties), in oils as well as water-colour, with a combination
of acute observation and poetic insight that is very rare. His pictures
give pleasure not only to lovers of the fine arts, but to lovers of the
country as well, especially to informed lovers, such as farmers,
gardeners, botanists, and to other painters of landscape.
Once rid of the archaism of the untaught, his work has altered
little, and his best works are to be found throughout all his active
years. We find the same qualities, for instance, in The Deserted Sheep
Pen* of 1938, and Farmyard in the Snow? of 1947, Winter Afternoon*
of 1945 (Plate 23), and Snow at Wormingford* of 1946, and Pond at
Little Horkeslef of 1953; and The Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble* of
about 1922 (Plate 22): we find, that is to say, firm, logical struc
ture, deeply informed observation, modest, unaffected candour of
statement and poetic insight. They are pictures that one cannot
contemplate without a sense of enhanced life. If there has been a
change I would say that the broad generalizations, the bold forth
right structure of his earlier years, have been enriched by new
subtleties of colour and design and a growing inclination towards a
'close-up* view of things. 'Haifa haystack interests me now,' I recall
his telling me in 1938, just as much as a wide stretch of country/
This heightened preoccupation with the intimate and the near-with
the foregrounds of landscape- was an expression of his interest in
horticulture. This interest was first stirred in 1922 by his possession,
with his cottage at Princes Risborough, for the first time, of a
garden; it was fostered by the friendship of gardeners, notably
1 Whereabouts unknown. 2 Coll. Mr. Simon Nowell-Smith.
3 The City Art Gallery, Birmingham. 4 Coll. Mrs. Janet Rath.
5 Coll. Mrs. Mary Cohen. 6 The Tate Gallery, London.
244 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Clarence Elliott, and Jason Hill. (He has made a pictorial record of
all the best plants he has grown.)
The landscapes of John Nash are uncommon in that they are the
work of a countryman. His brother Paul also loved landscape, but
he brought to his interpretations of it a town-sharpened and in
nately literary intelligence and town-forged weapons, but John is a
countryman by lifelong residence and in all his interests. Where Paul
would write a manifesto or form a group, John transplants some
roses; where Paul would cherish the words of Sir Thomas Browne
or Blake, John consults a seed catalogue.
If I have so far treated John Nash almost exclusively as a painter
of landscape it is because it is upon what he has done in this branch of
his art that his reputation will eventually rest, and it is my own
conviction that as an interpreter of English landscape he will be
accorded a high place among the painters of his time. It would be
wrong, however, to suppose landscape to be his exclusive pre
occupation, for he is a man whose creative energies have taken many
forms, and although his pace of work is unhurried and he is as little
responsive to the spur of ambition as any artist I know, he has a body
of work to his credit as large as it is various.
For a brief period in 1921 he became 'The London Mercury's'
first art critic. He has served from time to time and to good purpose
as a teacher, first from 1922 until 1927 at the Ruskin School of
Drawing at Oxford, of which his friend Sydney Carline was then
Master, and in the Department of Design of the Royal College of
Art from 1934 (when my father was Principal) until 1940, and again,
at the invitation of the present Principal Mr. Robin Darwin, from
1945. Early in the Second World War he joined the Observer Corps
and in 1940 was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty.
In November that year, preferring to serve his country more directly,
he gave up painting and, being commissioned first as Captain and
later as acting Major in the Royal Marines, he held responsible posts
under the Commanders-in-Chief, Rosyth and Portsmouth. 'He
didn't like being an official artist for the Admiralty-couldn't do
anything he said and just went on nagging until he got back into
active service. Was there ever such a chap?' wrote his brother to
Bottomley. 1 It was not until the end of 1944, after being demobilized,
1 Op. tit., p. 222.
JOHN NASH 245
that he resumed the practice of his art. This act of self-abnegation is
characteristic of John Nash, and the measure of the distance between
him and the artist for whom the welfare of his art is the sole criterion
of conduct.
Apart from landscape painting the two principal activities of his
life are drawing and engraving on wood. Drawing, practised since
his school-days at Wellington, has been a constant preoccupation,
and engraving on wood since before 1920. He has made illustrations
for no fewer than twenty-six books, in line, coloured lithograph or
wood engraving; the first to be published was 'Dressing Gowns and
Glue' by L. de G. Sieveking, in 1919, and the latest 'Parnassian
Molehill' by the Earl of Cranbook, in 1953. Until the middle
'twenties his drawings were mainly comic, but from that time on
wards, in fact from 1924 when he began to engrave on wood his
illustrations for 'Poisonous Plants', published three years later, plants
became his chief preoccupation, and his illustrations to Jason Hill's
'The Curious Gardener' (1933), R. Gathorne-Hardy's 'Wild
Flowers in Britain' (1938), 'English Garden Flowers' (1948), and
White's 'The Natural History of Selborne' (1951) have become
classics.
A classic could be written around this artist's life and works, so
dedicated and so reticent, its pastoral setting so remote from the envy
and competition of the market-place.
ROY DE MAISTRE
b. 1894
THE painting of Roy de Maistre has none of the characteristics
which ensure popularity. It is without the dashing rhetoric of
John's, the glowing sensuousness of Matthew Smith's, or the
comprehensive humanity of Spencer's; it lacks the highly idiosyn
cratic style which makes it impossible to mistake a Lowry on sight.
It is a reticent art, yet not even obviously reticent like Gwen John's.
It is difficult to place in a category, which is perhaps one of the reasons
why it has been little noticed by the critics. It is an art at first glance
deceptively obvious. At first glance a painting by de Maistre might
look like another essay in Analytic Cubism. Scrutiny reveals an art,
however, not only reticent but extremely complex.
Nearly thirty years ago a. thoughtful Australian friend of his
described him as a painter as 'essentially ... a realist'. 'I do not
believe,' he added, 'that he is tormented by a desire to express his
subconscious in paint . . . that would be opposed to a fundamental
reticence in him.' 1 This friend was right to recognize the realist in
him, and the reticence too, but the reference to the subconscious, if
correct in fact, is, I believe, mistaken in intention. De Maistre is
indeed unpreoccupied, so far as I am aware, with his subconscious,
but he is so intensely preoccupied with the most delicate perceptions
of his conscious self on the spiritual level as to qualify the applicability
of the term realist. The content of his paintings is drawn from the
depths of his inner experience-experience apprehended and trans
muted by a strong and lucid intelligence. 'Why shouldn't intelli
gence,' asked his friend Burdett, aptly quoting from Maurois's
'Colonel Bramble', 'have an art of its own as sensibility has?'
The springs of Roy de Maistre's art are various and complex. It
is an art, moreover, that bears no obvious relation to the artist. The
few examples of it that I had earlier come upon appeared to be the
products of a personality 'advanced' in opinion and aggressive to the
point of harshness. When I visited his studio at 13 Eccleston Street,
1 *R. de Mestre 5 , by Basil Burdett. 'Art in Australia', June 1925.
246
ROY DE MAISTRE 247
Victoria, I was surprised to be greeted by a man of neat, somewhat
Edwardian appearance and urbane manners; to notice, on the little
table in his hall, a collapsible opera-hat reposing beside a Roman
Missal. The long painting-room was full of objects miscellaneous yet
carefully chosen: a sofa designed by his friend Francis Bacon, a
French eighteenth-century chair, shabby in condition but superb in
quality. All these objects were overshadowed by the canvasses of
de Maistre which face the visitor from wall, floor and easel, from the
far end of the room. The paintings of some men look their best in
the company of others, but these complemented and reinforced one
another. Until I had received the impact of this display I understood
nothing of the work of my host. One reason why they gained from
one another was the clarity of each. There was no babel, but a
number of strong, lucid statements. It is possible for an inferior artist
to be lucid and strong if he selects suitably simple subjects, but it
takes talent to make lucid, strong statements about complicated
matters, and the content of de Maistre's pictures is almost always
complicated, whether the still-lifes which stood on the floor or the
big Pieta and Crucifixion on easels above.
Good painters are rare beings and their origins may mostly be
regarded as improbable. LeRoy Leveson Laurent Joseph de Maistre
came from a place and an environment remote from the painting-
room in Eccleston Street and what it stands for. He was born on
27 March 1894, the sixth son among the eleven children of Etienne
de Mestre 1 and his wife Clara, daughter of Captain George Taylor
Rowe, at a house named Maryvale, a big farm-house, at Bowral in
New South Wales, Australia. Etienae de Mestre was distantly related
to the illustrious philosopher Count Joseph de Maistre. When Roy
was eighteen months old his parents left Maryvale and after renting
Ulster Park near Fitzroy Falls for three years they took Mount
Valdemar, near the village of Sutton Forest, a colonial-style house
formerly the residence of the Governors of New South Wales.
Roy's upbringing was unusual: his family life was patriarchal; he
attended no school but picked up what he could from the tutors and
governesses who ministered to the needs of his large family. The
French origin of the de Mestres gave them a sense of detachment,
1 The family spelt their name thus; from about the middle "twenties the painter
reverted to the earlier form.
248 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
slight but distinct, from their neighbours. Racial separateness was a
little sharpened by class separateness also. The de Mestres were a great
family who formed close associations with successive Governors and
their families, who spent the summers at their official country
residence near by, and it was in an atmosphere slightly vice-regal,
informal yet sophisticated, that he grew up. Until he was nineteen
he led a contented life among his numerous brothers and sisters on
their father's big farm, a life in which horses played a predominant
part, for Etienne de Mestre, in spite of his Tolstoyan appearance, was
one of the great racing personalities in Australia, the winner of five
Melbourne Cups.
From an early age Roy de Maistre drew and painted 'with a good
deal', he told me, 'of preoccupation and passion, but my real interest
was in music'. He studied the violin in the State Conservatorium of
New South Wales, and the viola as well. Such preoccupations as
these, especially in a boy to whom the whole world of sport was
open, his father was never able to comprehend. Yet he had no
antagonism towards them. His mother, on the other hand, was
sympathetic towards his intention to tread what, for a member of
their family, were unusual paths. In 1913 he went to Sydney to study
music and painting, the last at the Royal Art Society of New South
Wales, under Norman Carter and Datillo Rubbo, and later at the
Sydney School of Art under Julian Ashton.
Roy de Maistre is in one respect unique within my experience: he
is a painter not innately a visual man. The great majority of painters
live, from their early years, through their eyes. Not only did the
young de Maistre live chiefly through his ears, but his drawings and
paintings, so far as I have been able to ascertain, were not expressions
of things that he saw or imagined; they were schematic expressions
of his active analytical intellect. He must have appeared not only
unvisual but altogether uncreative, for even as a musician his aspira
tions lay in the direction of execution rather than composition.
In the course of his studies he formed a friendship that both
quickened and directed his interest in painting. Norah Simpson, a
lady of talent and magnetic personality, had not long before returned
from England to continue her studies. She had been to the Slade
School and was friendly with members of the Camden Town Group,
especially with Charles Ginner. The effect of her return upon
24. ROY DE MAISTRE. Crucifixion (1942-4).
Oil, 36x48 in. The City Art Gallery, Leicester
ROY DE MAISTRE 249
de Maistre and other students was immediate and fruitful. For more
than a quarter of a century the Impressionism of Monet and Pissarro
had remained the most modern impulse in Australian painting. It
had a long succession of practitioners, a number of them accom
plished, and a few, most notably Arthur Streeton, more than
accomplished. Little news of subsequent movements had reached
Australia. The appearance among them of a persuasive advocate of
Post-Impressionism, the friend of men familiar with the work and
ideas of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne, could hardly be other
wise than exciting. But before de Maistre had time to make a serious
beginning as a painter the war came, and in 1916 he joined the
Australian Army, only to be discharged within nine months, a
sufferer from tuberculosis. Norah Simpson had made him aware
of the ideas which were animating his own contemporaries in
England and Europe. The next stage in his development was less
direct.
During his convalescence-when he began to paint again-he made
several friends in the medical profession. Among these was Dr.
Moffat, Director of the Gladesville Mental Hospital, who interested
de Maistre in psychology.
Patients in mental hospitals at that time were often placed in wards
decorated in colours calculated to ameliorate their condition by
virtue of the stimulating or sedative effect of the colours employed.
This feature of their treatment led to his preoccupation with the
whole problem of colour in relation to mental health. The current
practice seemed to him so crude and elementary that he persuaded
the Red Cross authorities to allow him to experiment with colour
in one of their hospitals for shell-shock patients. The results were so
satisfactory that he raised money to establish the Exeter Conva
lescent Home-of which Dr. Moffat became the Medical Director-
where shell-shocked soldiers were treated in accordance with his own
ideas. Here the rooms were painted not in single colours, but in
colour-keys, which enabled patients to receive the full benefits of
colour treatment without the retinal exhaustion produced by
prolonged exposure to single colours. This preoccupation had
beneficial results both for shell-shocked soldiers and for the painting
of de Maistre. By 1918 his meditations and researches were suffi
ciently advanced to permit of his delivering, at the Australian Arts
250 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Club, Sydney, a talk entitled 'Colour in Art', in which he outlined
his theory for harmonizing colour in accordance with the musical
system of harmonizing sound, based upon the analogies between
the colours of the spectrum and the notes of the musical scale.
I should like to trace its evolution [he said] from the first scale which I
experimented with. It was composed of eight colour notes and was
really nothing more than a natural scale based upon the seven principal
colours of the spectrum, the eighth note being a repeat of the key note
to form an octave musical scale. Having gone this far, it will be easy to
understand how the next steps came about. Seeing an obvious simi
larity between this eight note colour scale and an ordinary well
tempered musical scale, and having no colours which would correspond
to sharps or flats in music, I decided that it most resembled the scale of
C major. I also noticed that two of the most important notes in a
musical scale-the 4th and 5th degree-were represented by degrees of
colour complementary to the key note, and so, fixing the key note as
Yellow, the spectrum band developed into the scale of yellow major-
the order of progression being-Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet,
Red, Orange, Yellow. It then only remained to insert a tone of colour
between the ist and 2nd degree, the 2nd and 3rd degree and between
the 4th and 5th, 5th and 6th, 6th and yth degree and a chromatic colour
scale, such as the one we have here, was the result.
The next stage was inevitable. One only had to take the theory of
music as it applied to the major and minor scales and transfer its system
to the colour keyboard. The key note being decided upon and the
intervals between the preceding notes being the same as those of the
musical scale, I soon found that the colours representing the various
notes bore the correct relation to each other, and that their importance
in relation to the colour key note was much the same as the correspond
ing degrees of the musical scale- the most important feature being the
relation of the complementary colour to the key note, this colour
invariably representing in a cold and warm degree the dominant and
sub-dominant or 5th and 4th degree of a musical scale. In every scale
a degree of each of the seven colours of the spectrum is represented,
and when these are used in their right proportions, the invariable
results are distinct colour harmonies, retaining the general tone quality
of the key note, and an intense luminosity. Doubtless, this is due also
to the phenomena of simultaneous contrast mentioned before, as each
note is being balanced and made more brilliant by the juxtaposition of
its complementary on some part of the canvas.
Being an extremely practical man he invented in collaboration
with his friend the painter R. S. Wakelin, the disc designed to
ROY DE MAISTRE 25!
enable harmonious colour schemes to be selected from a colour scale
upon a standard principle. 1
This disc, which was put on the market in 1926, contained 132
variations of the seven colours of the spectrum, and was fitted with
two covering masks, one major and one minor, either on rotation,
revealing twelve different colour scales of seven colours each. The
invention provided a ready means of determining the relative degrees
of harmony and contrast between different colours on a scientific
basis.
In later years his interest in colour was matched by his interest in
design and form, yet colour continued to preoccupy him in a special
fashion. In 1934 he worked, for instance, upon a project for a film-
ballet in colour, in which the colour varied in relation to the music.
The opening sequences were a direct translation of the music into
terms of colour, and in the later, although direct translation ceased,
the key, pitch and texture of the colour were determined by the
music. Unfortunately the cost of production was beyond the
available resources.
During the war years painting gradually supplanted music as
de Maistre's chief preoccupation. He exhibited his work for the first
time at the Royal Art Society, Sydney, in 1918. His early paintings
appear to have been mostly landscapes, schematic both in colour and
design. There is little about them to affront the conservative taste of
to-day, but their intellectual character, manifest in their precisely
calculated patterns and their strong, clear, colour arrangements
designed to emphasize harmonies and contrasts, represented so
radical a departure from the prevailing Impressionism that they
offered a challenge to which established opinion was quick to react.
One critic took to task the selection committee which accepted works
by de Maistre for exhibition for 'neglecting to throw out some
samples of the art the charm of which depends on ignorance, or,
at least, negation of drawing and a sense of colour that a house-
painter might envy'. 2
The following year, jointly with Wakelin, a painter rather older
i Patented 6 May 1924 (no. 11176): 'Improvements in or relating to colour
selecting devices.* ,
a This and the other quotations from Sydney newspapers that follow are taken
from Sydney Press clippings which I have been unable precisely to identify.
252 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
than himself who shared many of his ideas, in particular those con
cerning the relationship between music and colour, de Maistre held
his first exhibition. 1 This comprised five of his paintings together
with exhibits illustrative of the application of his theories of colour
to interior decoration, and six works by Wakelin.
The exhibition was intended to be a challenging demonstration of
his theories of colour and it was on the occasion of its opening that
he delivered the talk from which extracts have been quoted.
All the paintings he showed were of the same highly intellectual
and schematic character, expressions of a lucid and analytical mind,
a mind so constituted as to be repelled by Impressionism and
attracted by subsequent developments of which it had as yet no
direct experience. As a consequence of the exhibition de Maistre
took a foremost place among those Australian painters possessed by
ideas not susceptible of communication in the language of Arthur
Streeton and his contemporaries -a language which they were there
fore under compulsion to replace. All Sydney was presently talking
about the pictures which, if he so wished, the artist could whistle.
A friendly critic prophesied that 'the exhibition by these two young
and enthusiastic artists will attract interest. These pictures, played in
paint . . . are played fortissimo in the treble. . . . No matter how
brilliant each seems, it is keyed harmoniously/ To others his works
were 'crudities' or 'garish enough to make a sensitive person
shudder'.
Most of the works of these early years have remained in Australia
(which I have never visited) but the few examples known to me
suggest that de Maistre developed very slowly. It is reasonable to
suppose that he could evolve no faster for want of direct contact
with the sources of the movement by remote intimations of which
his own art was formed. It should also be added that he profited little
from the formal teaching he received: he was incapable, he told me,
of making a realistic drawing much before 1918.
Such contact was not long denied him for, in the spring of 1923,
he was awarded the Travelling Scholarship of the Society of Artists
of New South Wales, which was a subsidy by the State and tenable
for two years. Twenty years had elapsed since this scholarship,
1 At the Art Salon (of which Gayfield Shaw was manager), 29 Elizabeth Street,
Sydney, from 8 August.
25. ROY DE MAISTRE. Seated Figure (1954)
Oil on board, 36 X 24 in. Coll. the Artist.
ROY DE MAISTRE 253
worth ^250 a year, had last been awarded. The previous recipient
was George W. Lambert, one of the judges in 1923. The works of
the ten competitors were hung in the National Gallery of New South
Wales.
De Maistre's departure for Europe was the cause of general regret.
The novelty of his ideas and his power to express them in words as
well as in paint, and the criticism implicit in them of the ideas upon
which the work of the most revered Australian painters was based,
had made him a controversial figure, but his ability was recognized
(one of his pictures had been bought by the National Gallery of
New South Wales in 1920) and the disinterestedness of his en
thusiasms had won general respect. Moreover his abilities as an
interior decorator-uncommon in Australia- were in regular demand.
London was his immediate destination. I did not come to know
him well until just thirty years later, but only just missed meeting
him on his arrival in the summer of 1923. The Governor of New
South Wales, Sir Walter Davidson, gave de Maistre a letter of intro
duction to my father, who received him not at home-where I was
still living-but at the Royal College of Art, of which he was
Principal. My father, who was the first painter, de Maistre told me,
whom he met in England, received him with encouragement and
kindness, and provided him with letters to painters in Paris. After
six months in London he moved to Paris, taking a studio in Mont-
parnasse. After spending eighteen months there he took a small
party of students for a summer painting holiday to St. Jean de Luz,
a place to which he became greatly attached and to which he
returned in 1930 and remained for three years. In Australia he had
thought of England as 'home', but although he had found satisfac
tion and even inspiration in London he was not aware, as he im
mediately was in France, of a kind of preordained harmony between
himself and his surroundings. The terms of his scholarship, however,
required that he should return to Australia and present his best work
to the National Gallery of his native State.
In 1926, the year of his return to Sydney, his first one-man
exhibition, consisting mainly of the work he had done in Europe,
was held at the Macquarie Galleries, in Bligh Street. Fisherman s
Harbour, St. Jean de Luz, 1 the painting judged by de Maistre to be
1 The National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
254 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the most substantial result of his tenure of the scholarship, he
presented to the Society which had awarded it. This I know only in
monochrome reproduction, from which it would appear to be a
sober work, deliberate both in design and execution, and close to, if
rather more atmospheric than, the Camden Town paintings of
Ginner and his friends. The sobriety of this and the other paintings
he brought home-unadventurous expressions of an adventurous
mind-is characteristic of his stability and his fastidiousness. Prepared
as he was to learn what the formative movements in Europe,
especially Cubism, had to teach him, it would not have accorded
with the dignity of his character to display any of the superficial
marks of conversion. He went to Europe first of all to learn the
essentials of painting and only secondly to develop, and without
haste, his own ideas and his personal view of nature. The works he
brought back suggest that his first three years there helped him
towards the realization of both these objectives.
The new pictures he showed at the Macquarie Galleries, which
expressed a fuller, warmer view of nature than the schematic works
of his earlier years, were received with interest and respect; but also,
as a maturer challenge to the entrenched tradition, with an enhanced
hostility. One influential critic, Howard Ashton, thus concluded the
brief disparaging paragraph-entitled 'Soulful Art' -he accorded to
them: 'As a contribution to Australian art, however suggestive they
may be to the highbrow, who believes that one should paint soul-
striving rather than facts, these pictures are, unhappily, negligible.'
De Maistre's three years abroad had shown him that Europe was
the place most favourable to the deepening of his faculties as a
painter, and the hostility with which his work was received hastened
his decision to leave Australia. In 1928 he accordingly returned to
London and two years later to St. Jean de Luz. Until the Second
World War he spent about half his time in England and half in
France.
Departure from Australia marked the end of a chapter in his life.
This was a longer and more important chapter than friends of recent
date might suppose. His patronymic and his work, his personality
and his experience are so unequivocally European that it is therefore
important to recall that in spite of a certain aloofness the de Maistre
family were very much a part of New South Wales and that he
ROY DE MAISTRE 255
himself as a young man was fully an Australian and led a free and
happy life there. He spoke French no better than average, and his
father had abandoned his hereditary religion Not many of those
who know him now suspect that there is a sense in which, aristocrat
though he is, he is also a self-made man. His establishment in Europe
is the consequence of acts of faith and will, as is also his membership
of the Catholic Church, even though it was the church of his fathers.
Like his art, his religion is not something inherited or supinely
accepted, but something won by personal conviction.
France is the country where he is in closest harmony with his
surroundings, but the war deprived him of his studio in St. Jean de
Luz and he has never been able, for economic reasons, to return
there. Three years before the war he transformed a cafe at 13
Eccleston Street into a studio, and after he settled finally in London
this became his home. The sense of isolation that besets him
in England contributed fruitfully, however, to the formation of
his art.
During the eight years that elapsed between his departure from
Australia and his permanent establishment in London he opened out,
and he found his place in the abstract tradition which derived, by
way of Cubism, from Cezanne and Seurat, an intellectual tradition
based upon structure and tending to be geometric and rectilinear.
Those who have worked in this tradition are often primarily
draughtsmen for whom colour is subordinate to design. The design
of de Maistre is always clear and sharp, but his impassioned interest
in colour never tempted him to allow it to play a subordinate part.
Like Cezanne, his principal master, his consistent aim has been to
evolve a way of painting in which design and colour shall become
one. This is a high aim, and in much of his early work it was realized
self-consciously, by an effort obvious to the spectator; or else it
eluded him altogether. It was only gradually that he mastered the
art that conceals art, and gained the knowledge and the power to use
design and colour so that each completes the other in a unity which,
however long struggled for, has the look of inevitability. In his early
paintings he ensured a degree of harmony by mixing all his colours
with white; the harmony so notable in the later works results from
the relation of pure colours-a harmony which gains resonance
because it expresses precise and closely-knit form.
256 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
When I alluded to de Maistre's having opened out, I intended to
convey that his nature as a painter deepened and broadened, and that
he became more perceptively aware of himself and of surrounding
life. The phrase serves to indicate the development of the man, but
not of his work, for this did not broaden out: it became, on the
contrary, more sharply focused, more concentrated. The process,
no doubt a manifestation of the natural evolution of his mind, was
hastened by his English domicile. In the South of France he loved to
walk abroad in the strong light, and the social climate fostered in him
an expansive disposition. As a painter he habitually makes decisions
between clearly defined alternatives, and the prevailing English grey
softens the sharp edges of things and blurs distinctions. So in London
he stays mostly indoors. The result is that he looks with fascinated
intensity at the cafe transformed into a studio which contains, like
Courbet's, a repertory of his past life, and this scrutiny, searching yet
affectionate, has made him a kind of intimiste. Carafe, fruit-dish,
lampshade, electric fan and potted hyacinth, each the object of con
templation, have been combined in lucid, close-knit arrangements
expressive of the painter's relation to his surroundings. There are
about them none of the cosy overtones that mark the work of most
intimistes, no attempted creation of a 'little world of Roy de Maistre'.
On the contrary there are, even in the gentlest, intimations of energy,
of harshness. If the world of de Maistre is not a 'little world', it is
governed by a strict sense of proportion which would be offended
were the petals of a hyacinth made harsher than the features of Our
Lady mourning over her dead Son. Intitnisme is but one facet-
although a large and characteristic one- of the art of de Maistre.
Religious subjects are a constant preoccupation with him, but to-day
serious religious painting recommends itself even less to religious
bodies than it does to the public at large. Of de Maistre's most
ambitious and impressive religious paintings, The Crucifixion, of
1953, remains unsold in his studio; and Pieta, of 1950, was presented
to the Tate Gallery in 1955. An earlier version of The Crucifixion, of
1942-3 (Plate 24), was acquired by The City Art Gallery, Leicester.
'The painter is always in search of a peg on which to hang his
creative urge,' I remember his saying. 'It isn't so much that he is
attracted by certain subjects, but simply that he recognizes them as
occasions for the exercise of this urge/ This, however, is not the
ROY DE MAISTRE 257
same as maintaining, as a whole school of painters and critics
maintains, that, for the painter's purpose, a pumpkin is as good as a
human head. De Maistre is moved, not as an eye merely but as a
whole man, by the subjects he chooses. He is moved by the images
of the Crucifixion and of Mary mourning over the dead Christ not
because these are dramatic 'subjects', or dramatic symbols, still less
just shapes, but because he believes in what they represent. Even
his carafe and fruit-dish are old friends, for whose characteristics he
has a keenly analytic affection. Whatever the subject of his choice,
his treatment of it-if circumstances permit it to take its full arduous
course-is always the same. He begins by making-usually at high
speed- a realistic representation, usually in charcoal, from which he
proceeds gradually, through a series of further studies, to his final,
often more or less abstract, design. Seated Figure? of 1954 (Plate 25),
neither realistic nor abstract, is a figure caught half-way, so to speak,
along this process. In the process he discards everything not relevant
to his intention, and adds everything that contemplation of it,
including all that his past experience of that particular thing, has
taught him. His final representations, however abstract they may
seem, are deeply rooted in some total human experience. These
series, in which he dwells with an almost obsessive persistence upon
a given image, sometimes take years to complete. One of them, for
instance, began in 1937 with a realistic half-length portrait of a
seated woman. The second version, made eight years later, shows the
subject's face (serene in the first) twisted with inner disquietude. In
the third, made after two years, the figure is shown less tortured and
with a child, symbol, perhaps, of some satisfying work the subject
had undertaken. The fourth, made the year following, represents,
simply, a room where women had sat, the place where a female
drama had been enacted; and in the fifth, of the same year, the empty
room had become more agitated and dramatic; and in the sixth and
last the figure has again intruded, once again serene and impersonal. 2
Only rarely, however, is the struggle to make the final statement
to which nothing need be added, and from which nothing can be
taken away, quite so intricate, various and prolonged.
1 Coll. the Artist
2 All six belong to the painter. The last, completed in 1949, was dated, in absence
of mind, 1946.
258 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Roy de Maistre occupies a singular position in England to-day.
His work has aroused interest and respect since his first one-man
London exhibition, held in November 1929 in the studio of Francis
Bacon. 1 The public has had a number of further opportunities of
seeing it. The chief of these were exhibitions at the Mayor Gallery,
in October-November 1934; of Flower Paintings at the Calmann
Gallery in July 1938; at Temple Newsam, Leeds, from June until
August 1943, the most representative yet held -fifty-six works
illustrative of his development from 1920 until 1937; at the City Art
Gallery, Birmingham, 1946; at the Adams Gallery in March 1950,
and at the Hanover Gallery in April 1953 . Yet his work, held in high
respect as it is by a number of painters, chiefly his juniors, and a few
critics, remains little noticed by the general public. There are several
reasons for his relative obscurity. He is by nature fastidious and
reticent; he prefers the cultivation of friendships to social relations
that are casual or fortuitous, and for 'public relations' he has neither
taste nor aptitude. But most of all his isolation is due to the fact that
his art is not an art that lends itself to easy understanding. It is
destitute alike of bonhomie and of fashionable cliche. The kind of
abstract which aims at being a self-sufficient construction of form
and colour, appealing to the eye alone, is to-day fairly widely under
stood, but abstract painting the source of which is human as distinct
from purely visual experience, and often experience that is com
plicated and obscure, is apt to baffle and to disconcert. 'In con
temporary painting, our compositions,' he noted in an unpublished
paper, 'being ruled by the laws of order, are in a sense mathematical
and geometrical, but far beyond the extent to which we can use
geometry and mathematics.' More generally his attitude to art is
summed up in a fragment that occurs in another of "his unpublished
papers: 'The problems of art, like those of life itself, are in the main
unsolvable as separate entities-art being a reflection of life-the
solution of one problem will be the solution of the other. , . . The
forces in art are the forces of life, coordinated and organized.'
De Maistre's is an art which abounds in enchanting by-products-
small flowerpieces, still-lifes and the like-but in essence it is the
expression of a nature deep, little given to compromise, and harsh.
'In one's life one ought to be gentle and forbearing,' he once said to
1 At 19 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington.
ROY DE MAISTRE 259
me, 'but in one's art one should conduct oneself quite differently.
It's often necessary, for instance, to give the spectator an ugly left
uppercut.'
This actively benevolent and deeply civilized man inevitably finds
much to horrify him in this world of ours in which cruelty and
vulgarity play so inordinate a part and which offers so sombre a
prospect; yet nothing clouds his confidence in the illumination that
awaits the artist with the courage to press forward in search, in his
own words, *of that finality of expression which is the aim of all
seekers after truth'.
BEN NICHOLSON
b. 1894
IF the art of painting were nothing more than the creation of forms
and their interrelation and colouring so as to give the greatest
pleasure-as many critics believe it to be-there would be no
particular difficulty in finding a common measure for comparing
representational with abstract works. The common measure would,
of course, be a 'formal' yardstick, to vary the metaphor, a sort of
diviner's rod which would enable the wielder of it to discover and
compare the elements of 'formal beauty' whether in, say, a Rem
brandt or a Mondriaan. That forms and their disposition and colour
constitute the essentials of the language of painting I suppose most
critics would regard as self-evident, but a radical difference of opinion
arises as to whether form and colour constitute, by themselves, the
whole of painting or whether they constitute a language which may
legitimately express conceptions from other than the purely aesthetic
fields of human experience. Should the purpose of painting be to
make an appeal exclusively to an aesthetic appetite, as cookery to the
appetite for food? That is the crux of the question. For those whose
conclusions lead them to give one answer a shaggy turnip in a half-
light painted by Rembrandt with the same intensity and skill as one
of his self-portraits as an old man would have a similar value, and
the ceiling of the Sistine might without the slightest loss be regarded
as a noble arabesque. But however severely critics so persuaded may
insist upon the irrelevance of the subject of a work of art, it may be
observed that a supercilious note is apt to creep into their comments
when a modern work with a subject explicitly drawn from the
phenomenal world is under consideration. Critics for whom the
answer to the crucial question is the contrary of this, and who persist
in seeing the distinction-which to their opponents seems unreal if
not perverse-between the head of Rembrandt and a turnip, are apt,
in the presence of an abstract work, to become taciturn, or to take
refuge in reflexions upon abstract art in general. The 'formal'
divining rod, whether the subject of a critic's attentions happens to be
260
If
26, BEN NICHOLSON, Higkr CarnsMa Farm (1944).
Oil, 2IJJ-X 24 in. Coll. Mrs, Elsie Myers,
BEN NICHOLSON 26l
figurative or abstract is a thoroughly useful implement. About this
there can be no possible doubt. Yet somehow, even in the most
experienced hand, it fails to do more than serve as a very approximate
common measure for representational and abstract works of art.
A conspicuous example of the only relative utility of the imple
ment in question is furnished by the subject of the present study. It
so happened that I had some part in the selection of two retrospective
exhibitions of the work of Ben Nicholson, that sent to the Venice
Biennale in the summer of 1954 and the considerably extended and
modified version of it held at the Tate the following year. In the
course of their organization and showing I heard many opinions
about the artist from many different kinds of men. According to
some he was a great artist; according to others he was of little
significance; but upon one point all seemed to be agreed: that he was
the most convinced and consistent exponent of abstract painting at
work in Great Britain. It was evident that their estimate of his
stature varied with the critic's estimate of the value of abstract art:
to those who esteemed it highly he was the leader of an important
school, and to those who did not he was an artist of merit exercising
his sensibility and skill up a blind alley.
The failure, upon this particularly appropriate occasion for its use,
of the aesthetic divining-rod brought finally home to me that, in
practice, critics do not judge works exclusively on aesthetic grounds,
those who claim to do so being in fact unfavourably prejudiced by
a subject drawn from common experience and the others, for whom
formal perfection is not the whole of art, by its absence. Abstract
painting is not to be judged according to canons applicable to
representational painting, and in my own case I fail, beyond a
certain point, to respond to the uncommunicative forms and relation
ships which constitute at the same time the language and the message
of abstract art. And the limitations of my pleasure are emphasized
rather than removed by the pleadings of its advocates. I think it
proper to refer to this disqualification for the full appreciation of
what appears to me a highly special province of painting, before I
treat particularly of one of its most accomplished denizens.
Ben Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 in a house made out
of two cottages in Denham, Buckinghamshire, the eldest of the four
children of William Nicholson, one of the earlier subjects of these
262 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
studies, and his wife Mabel, born Pryde. His education both general
and professional-for it was early assumed that he would be a painter
-was sporadic. He was sent to Haddon Court, a preparatory school
in Hampstead, and to Gresham's School, Holt, where he overworked
and overplayed and whence he was withdrawn exhausted at the end
of his first year. If in this brief span he added no artistic lustre to the
annals of this ancient school, he made a little cricket history by
playing for the First XL Ben Nicholson is an accomplished player
not only of cricket but of all ball games (I had occasion to mention
in the previous volume my own first encounter with him, across a
ping-pong table). At the Slade- where also he remained only for
one year 1 ~he spent almost as much time playing billiards at the
Gower Hotel as at his studies. 'Although I was not conscious of it at
the time,' he once said to me, *I think that the billiard-balls, so cleanly
geometrical in form and so ringingly clear in colour, against the
matt-green of the baize, must have appealed to my aesthetic sense,
in contrast to the fustiness of the classrooms at the Slade.' But
billiards was not incompatible with occasional attendance at the
School. Paul Nash, a fellow student and his frequent companion at
lunch at Shoolbreds, recalls an occasion when they were painting
from the male model in the Life Class. The students, with a single
exception, followed the realistic method that was taught. Paul Nash
was shocked to notice that Ben Nicholson was not conforming. . . .
Upon a large sheet of paper, on a drawing board of Imperial size set
upon a painting easel, he had drawn in heavy pencil a small dark
figure, a sort of manikin, bearing no resemblance to the model. It
was, of course, simply his personal equivalent for the model, charac
teristically presented, and not the kind of equivalent approved of. 2
Paul Nash was an acute observer and a lucid writer, and, although
a worthy witness, I feel bound to observe that I find this particular
item of evidence surprising. For reasons upon which I shall presently
1 One term is die period for which Ben Nicholson is customarily said to have
studied at the Slade, as, for instance, in the Lund Humphries volume p. 22, and
the Penguin p. <5. The records of the Slade, however, show him to have been
there throughout the first two terms of the session 1910-11 (October 1910 to
April 1911) and for half the third term of that session; he then returned to the
Slade for the first term only of the session 1911-12 (October to December 1911).
2 'Ben Nicholson's Carved Reliefs', by Paul Nash. 'Architectural Review*
October 1935.
BEN NICHOLSON 263
enlarge Ben Nicholson felt his way very tentatively, over a period
of years, towards an attitude in which he tried, instead of represent
ing some aspect of familiar experience, to find an 'equivalent' for it.
I believe that not many works of his early years survive; he was not
prolific and I suspect that his sense of perfection leads him to destroy
examples when occasion offers. He has spoken to me of his early
work as 'Vermeerish' and The Striped Jug, 1 of 1911, shows what he
meant. Paul Nash refers to a brief early period of portraiture, during
which his sitters showed no liking for the 'equivalents' he evolved, of
which I have never seen an example, but it would seem that the works
described as 'Vermeerish' constitute his effective point of departure.
After leaving the Slade he went to Tours to learn French. Here,
after giving much time to tennis and some to painting, he returned
with a single oil of a candlestick. Tours was followed by Milan,
where he remained for several months, learning Italian and doing a
little painting: he brought back two still-lifes, one of a skull. Not
long after his visit to Italy his health gave cause for disquiet and he
went to Madeira, where he learnt a little Portuguese and brought
back one painting. The First World War broke out not long after
wards, and Ben Nicholson, first graded GS , then rejected for military
service, went, in 1917, to Pasadena, California, for nine months,
coming home on account of his mother's death, in June 1918. In his
longish stay in California he made only a single painting: 'a Vermeer-
looking thing' was how he described this work to me.
When the war ended Ben Nicholson was twenty-five, and the
end of his long and apparently unfruitful apprenticeship was hardly
in sight. This would seem an appropriate point to interrupt this
summary chronology of his progress by some inquiry into the cause
of his failure to find his way, of the inhibition which, indeed, almost
prevented him from painting at all. Everything seemed to favour a
quick apprenticeship and a flying start. He was naturally dexterous,
and able with little effort to master any game or craft; he was
ambitious and purposeful, and, far from having parental opposition
to contend with, he had for parents painters both of whom favoured
his following the family calling and were ready to impart to him the
fruit of their experience and able to spare him the necessity of making
a livelihood by other means than painting. But appearances were in
1 Formerly Coll. Sir William Nicholson but untraced after his death.
264 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
this respect deceptive: the inhibition was the very consciousness of
being heir to an art from which he could not withhold either ad
miration or affection, yet which, as he vaguely saw, did not offer the
means whereby he could express most readily his own apprehension
of the world he lived in. To-day the circle into which he was born
is regarded as of little consequence. The painting of the members of
it is apt to be discounted as a belated, provincial manifestation of the
Realist tradition deriving immediately from the Impressionists and
Whistler; their lives as unduly self-conscious. But to those who grew
up in it the best of their works are not unworthy expressions of the
great discontinuous tradition of English painting and their lives a
memorable combination of sustained idealism with liveliness and
urbanity. They challenged the complacency of the later Victorians
and extended a comprehending welcome to the talent of their
successors. In ages when the arts are regulated by traditional canons
which change imperceptibly, son can follow father with a reassuring
sense of inevitability. But in ages like our own, when traditional
canons exercise ever diminishing authority and achievement is so
preponderantly personal, son can scarcely follow father without
some sense of cramping personal subordination, of inviting the risk
of doing again what has been done already.
Innately an artist, yet almost overborne by the accomplishment
of his father, of his mother and of his uncle James Pryde, the first
need of Ben Nicholson's survival as an artist was to make, however
modest, a personal beginning, and it was his admiration, affection
and sense of indebtedness that made the fulfilment of this need so
prolonged and, in the immediate sense, so unproductive a struggle.
Those who have written about Ben Nicholson have underrated
his affiliations with the past. Of The Striped Jug for instance, Mr.
John Summerson, in an excellent appreciation of the artist's work,
has written, 'It is easy now to see in its solitariness, its anti-swagger,
the painter's horror of ... becoming a genteel protagonist of
Vermeerishness/ 1 Surely in this instance Mr. Summerson has
allowed his knowledge of the direction in which the artist was to
develop later to colour his judgment of a painting made in 1911. For
The Striped ]ug is by Vermeer out of William Nicholson, and
nothing more, and coming upon it stacked among other pictures in
1 'Ben Nicholson', The Penguin Modern Painters, 1948, p. 6.
BEN NICHOLSON 265
the elder Nicholson's studio, I do not believe that any friend of
father or of son, or Mr. Summerson himself, would have taken it for
anything but the work of the father. Far from being a horrified
protest against the prevailing current, it is an accomplished essay in
his father's manner, a convincing demonstration that he could
vermeer with the best. His father, who liked the picture, asked, 'but
why one jug?' 'Well,' responded the son, "why don't you paint
morel The result was the father's Hundred Jugs.
Little by little, however, forces far removed from the inhibiting
tensions arising from the pervasive influence of his family and his im
perative need to escape from it began to exert their influence. On his
return from America he became exhilaratingly aware of Cezanne, and
Vorticism compelled his admiring curiosity, especially as expressed
in the art and advocacy of Wyndham Lewis, and must have made a
forceable appeal to his innate love of clarity. An experience more fruit
ful than any that he had before came to him in Paris a few years later.
I remember suddenly coming on a cubist Picasso [he wrote to Mr.
Summerson] at the end of a small upstairs room at Paul Rosenberg's gal
lery. It must have been a 1915 painting-it was what seemed to me then
completely abstract. And in the centre there was an absolutely miracu
lous green-very deep, very potent and absolutely real. In fact, none of
the actual events in one's Hfe have been more real than that, and it still
remains a standard by which I judge any reality in my own work. . . - 1
It often happens that the most independent persons are not the
least susceptible to influence. Ben Nicholson is a highly independent
man and his early life was devoted to the search for the means to give
effect to his independence. In the early 'twenties he met and later
married Winifred Roberts, a painter with a way of seeing very
different from his own, who by the discernment of her sympathy
and the example of her instinctive and appealing art was able to help
to unseal the springs of his creativity. In her company the inhibiting
tenseness which for so long had made him virtually incapable of
painting at all finally relaxed.
With her he spent three successive winters at Castagnola, near
Lugano, and the summers at her home in Cumberland with visits to
London in between. Mr. Summerson refers to a scrapbook put
together in 1922 which summarized his loyalties: Giotto, Uccello,
1 Letter dated 3 January 1944; the paragraphs quoted here were first published
in Summerson, op, cit., p, 7.
266 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Cezanne, the Douanier, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picasso. The sense
of the passing away of the shadows of war, of belonging at last to a
tradition to which he could respond without reserve, and the
companionship of his wife gave him an exhilarating conviction of
having begun his life's work. This least productive of painters began
to make three or four pictures a week. Few of them survive, but his
energies were released and though he still had far to go to find
himself, henceforward he travelled fast.
The intensive search and experiment of these years resulted, from
the middle 'twenties until the early 'thirties, in a succession of still-
lifes in which features characteristic of his mature work are discernible.
These still-lifes conform to those of the contemporary School of
Paris alike in their subjects-jugs, bottles, plates and knives reposing
upon the scrubbed tops of kitchen tables -and in the degree of
abstraction with which they are treated. They also show a delicate
sureness of taste and colour which are decidedly his own. But he was
still only feeling his way, and there was little evidence of the un
compromising austerity or the precision of design that was to be the
most conspicuous mark of his later work. The design of most of his
paintings of this time known to me is, in fact, loose and uncertain,
and this weakness and his obvious eagerness to discard, in the
interests of a franker approach to his themes, the smooth accomplish
ment of his Vermeerish beginnings give them a tentative air, and on
this account I question Mr. Summerson's opinion that their beauty is
'amply appreciated by people who have any liking at all for contem
porary painting'. Had the painter died in 1930 1 doubt whether such
works as Painting* of 1923-4, or Still-Life* of about 1926-to name
two considered sufficiently representative for inclusion in the sump
tuous volume 'Ben Nicholson: paintings, reliefs, drawings' 3 ~would
attract attention to-day. A few, however, notably Still Life with Fruit*
of 1927, and Au Chat Botte, 5 of 1932, merit, chiefly on account of the
rare beauty of their colour, places among the artist's finest works.
To the late 'twenties belongs a group of landscapes painted in Cum
berland and Cornwall, but with few exceptions these rank below
his best work. Landscape evidently failed to evoke in him a response
1 Coll. the Artist 2 CO JL M^ He i en Sutherland.
3 With an introduction by Sir Herbert Read, 1948.
4 Coll. Mr. F. L. S. Murray. 5 The City Art Gallery, Manchester.
BEN NICHOLSON 267
sufficiently ardent to enable him to create with conviction, yet, unlike
his still-life, it was too complex to be reduced, without doing violence
to its character, to the simple, clear-cut terms that his way of seeing
demanded. Occasionally, however, in such a picture as Pitt Creek,
Cornwall, 1 of 1928, he was able to maintain an impressive harmony
between the requirements of close representation and lucid design.
In the very early 'thirties he relaxed his efforts to reconcile
the demands of the effective representation of nature -of nature in
her more complex aspects at all events-and those of design, and
he turned decisively towards abstraction. Several circumstances
favoured this re-orientation. Nicholson described a painting by Miro
he saw in 1932 or 1933 as 'the first free painting that I saw and it
made a deep impression-as I remember it, a lovely rough circular
white cloud on a deep blue background, with an electric black line
somewhere'. 2 More decisive was his first meeting in Paris with
Mondriaan. Nicholson thus described what must have been, I think,
the most illuminating experience of his life:
His studio . . . was an astonishing room: very high and narrow . . .
with a thin partition between it and a dancing school and with a
window on the third floor looking down on to thousands of railway
lines emerging from and converging into the Gare Montparnasse. He'd
lived there for years and except during the war had scarcely been out
side Paris -he'd stuck up on the walls different sized rectangular pieces
of board painted a primary red, blue and yellow and white and neutral
grey -they'd been built up during those 25 years. The paintings were
entirely new to me and I did not understand them on this first visit
(and indeed only partially understood them on my second visit a year
later). They were merely, for me, a part of the very lovely feeling
generated by his thought in the room. I remember after this first visit
sitting at a cafe table on the edge of a pavement almost touching all the
traffic going in and out of the Gare Montparnasse, and sitting there for
a very long time with an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose! -the
thing I remembered most was the feeling of light in his room and the
pauses and silences during and after he'd been talking. The feeling in
his studio must have been not unlike the feeling in one of those hermits'
caves where Hons used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws. 3
And last there was a more intimate circumstance: he met Barbara
Hepworth, whom he married after the dissolution of his marriage to
Winifred Nicholson. In place of a lyrical and feminine painter at
1 Coll Mr. C. S. Reddihough. 2 Summerson, op. cit., p. 12. a Ibid., pp. 12-13 .
268 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
work by his side there was an abstract sculptor of the most uncom
promising kind. (I have heard him acknowledge in the most
generous terms his debt to his wives. 'I learnt a great deal about colour
from Winifred Nicholson/ he said, 'and a great deal about form
from Barbara Hep worth/)
The decisive cause, however, for change was to be found in the
artist himself. In these days many young artists attach themselves to
the abstract movement because it is the fashion, a fashion, moreover,
which threatens to become a new and stultifying academism, but
Ben Nicholson has evidently moved nearer and nearer towards pure
abstraction under the impulse of some inner compulsion. Pure
abstraction is, in any possible circumstances, the position to which
by one road or another he would inevitably have made his way, but
the inner compulsion was fostered by the three favourable circum
stances enumerated just now.
From time to time Ben Nicholson has painted landscapes with a
frank and tasteful felicity, but he is, I believe, one of those for whom
the demands of representation are restrictive, and therefore, con
sciously or not, resented. When he described the Miro he saw in the
early 'thirties as 'the fast free painting I saw', I take his meaning to
be that it suggested to him the possibility of creating a work of art
which would fulfil his own inner requirements without involving
the smallest concession to the, to him, restrictive traffic with pheno
menal appearances. And that contact almost certainly inspired such
a work as Painting ipjj 1 with its free-floating red discs.
I take it that the reason for the radical effect of Nicholson's contacts
with Mondriaan upon his art was that Mondriaan represented in its
extremest and most logical form the abstraction which he felt
to be the culmination of his own most intimate promptings.
For him as for many others Mondriaan must have been the personi
fication of abstract art. In one important respect the influence
of Mondriaan affected his work immediately and for good. 'All
art/ Mondriaan declared, 'expresses the rectangular relationship/
Nicholson conformed to this exclusive injunction from the year of
this momentous meeting. The further dogma that 'the straight line
is a stronger and more profound expression than the curve' also
became one of his oWn articles of faith,
1 Cofl. Edna Nixon.
BEN NICHOLSON 269
It is important to draw, at once, a clear distinction between Mon-
driaan and Nicholson. Mondriaan was an intellectual, a theologian,
so to speak, of an artistic faith, who also testified to his faith by paint
ing. Nicholson is an instinctive painter, driven by his inner com
pulsion to the conclusion reached by Mondriaan primarily through
the operations of his intellect: 1 have difficulty in reading Mondriaan
because I much prefer the direct impact I get from his painting. I have
not read more than a few sentences from Kandinsky.' 1 He paints as he
does by instinct, but, although not well read in it, he has picked up a
fair working knowledge of the faith which justifies his practice.
It was not only the theory and practice of Mondriaan that affected
Nicholson but his personality as well, in particular his solemnity
illumined occasionally with a pale flash of humour. On entering for
the first time the studio which Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson
shared in the 'thirties Mondriaan remarked, 'What a fine studio
but' (shading his eyes from looking through the window at a large
and very beautiful chestnut tree) 'too much nature.' Such an incident
as this- related to me by Nicholson-although he did not miss the
element of fantasy which prompted them, appealed none the less to his
growing abhorrence of nature as a recognizable theme for art. I have
already noted, in this connexion, the influence of Barbara Hep worth,
who is as intellectual as her husband is instinctive, which must not be
discounted. It was she who kept steadily in his view the end towards
which he moved, and who fostered his alignment with the abstract
movement. In that she played a more positive part than he, who with
Naum Gabo and J. L. Martin was an editor of 'Circle', 2 the journal
founded to enable Constructivists to bring their id-eas before the public.
Under these strong impulses from within and without Nicholson's
art moved quickly towards an abstraction which made, eventually,
at its most characteristic, no concession at all to the world of common
visual experience. After 1933, when he was occupied largely with
paintings in which the design was mostly drawn in white lines with
the reverse end of the brush, which gave them the effect of en
gravings, his work assumed the character which it has since retained.
He has continued to make paintings and drawings of landscape, as
1 1 quote his own words to me.
2 'Circle: international survey of constructive art', 1937. Only one issue appeared.
Contributors included Mondriaan, le Corbusier, Gropius, Lewis Mumford, Moore,
270 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
well as still-life, or the two in combination. Absolved from any sense
of obligation to represent with any degree of exactitude, and with
unrestricted scope for the exercise of his faculties as a designer of pure
form, landscapes such, for instance, as St. Ives* of 1940, and Halse
Town, 2 of 1939-41, or Higher Carnstabba Farm, 3 of 1944 (Plate 26) ex
press a lyricism absent from the landscapes he made in the late 'twen
ties. Particularly happy, too, are indications of landscape, sometimes
very slight, that appear as backgrounds for still-lifes. Halse Town? of
1942, or Towednarck* of 1943 , are excellent examples. Such landscape
indications, moreover, can evoke most convincingly the distinct
atmosphere of Cornwall, where the artist has mainly lived since 1932.
Beautiful as many of his pictures are in which so much of a subject
is described by a few delicate, precise lines, some of them enclosing
sober monochrome washes, others simply areas of virgin paper or
canvas, it is, I think, upon his most intransigent^ abstract works that
his reputation will finally depend. For, paradoxically, it is in the
narrow world made of a few elementary geometrical forms, of a few
simple colours alone, that his spirit moves with that entire freedom
to which he has aspired so persistently. In an attempt to define the
unusual character of Nicholson's creativity Mr. Summerson alludes
to his 'power to deny, discard, eliminate in pursuit of reality'. 6 Or,
as the artist himself has written, * "Realism" has been abandoned in
the search for reality: the "principal objective" of abstract art is
precisely this reality.' 7
The fullest definition I have come upon of reality of this order
occurs in an essay on the artist by Sir Herbert Read.
Ben Nicholson who, like all the great artists of the past, [it runs] is
something of a mystic, believes that there is a reality underlying appear
ances, and that it is his business, by giving material form to his intuition
of it, to express the essential nature of this reality. He does not draw
that intuition of reality out of a vacuum, but out of a mind attuned
to the specific forms of nature~a mind which has stored within it a full
awareness of the proportions and harmonies inherent in all natural
phenomena, in the universe itself. 8
1 Coll. Mr. C. S. Reddihough. 2 Coll. E. Q. and Christopher Nicholson.
3 Coll. Mrs. Elsie Myers. * Coll. Mr. Mortimer Bennitt
5 Coll Mr. Peter Lanyon. 6 Op. cit, p. 13. 7 Ibid.
8 *A Coat of many Colours, occasional essays', by Herbert Read, 1945 (re
printed from *The Listener'.)
BEN NICHOLSON 27!
Sir Herbert frequently reminds us that utterances such as these
involve philosophical questions. They do indeed, and for quite a few
decades philosophers have been suspicious of phrases such as *a reality
underlying appearances': they have been apt to ask for the "cash
value' of these words as used in such contexts and to wonder whether,
in most contexts, they have any meaning at all. The antithesis of
appearance and reality has, however, a place in the history of
philosophy, though it is more than doubtful whether any two
classical philosophers have entertained the same notion of it or the
same notions of what it is that is being thus contrasted. It is, there
fore, problematic whether a phrase so obscure can be currently
introduced by any critic to throw light on anything.
It is possible, none the less, that in his use of this contrast Sir
Herbert has in mind its great originator, Plato. It is central to Plato's
theory of 'Ideas' or 'Forms' that, on the one hand, there are eide,
ideal 'Forms', on the other, particulars that are not instances but
imitations of them. What is it that Plato has in mind? The theory of
'Forms' starts from reflexion about morals and about mathematics,
and for the present purpose it is the latter that is relevant. A geometer
draws a circle, but this visible circle, though it has its uses as a
diagram and a symbol, is not the 'ideal' circle that he has in mind;
the circle that he is thinking about and that has all the necessary
properties of circle is purely and entirely an object of intelligence
alone, not an object of perception or, even, for that matter, of
imagination. The circle that the geometer sees or imagines, spring
board though it is for his thought, cannot be an instance of the
circle that has such and such necessary properties in virtue of circu
larity, for a little measurement would show up its inaccuracies.
It 'imitates* the 'real' circle, that is to say; it is not an example
of it.
Now Plato was convinced that 'appearances', that is to say visible
and imaginable things, do nothing but imitate 'reality', and he
thought it the most important thing in the world to come to some
knowledge of 'reality' and that this knowledge was philosophical
knowledge. It is in consequence of these convictions that he can see
little good in the visual arts. The visual arts, he declares, are con
cerned with appearances, 'imitations of imitations', not, therefore,
with 'reality' at all. And oddly enough, in a passage of the essay from
272 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
which I have quoted, Sir Herbert Read comes near to echoing
Plato's own condemnation of visual art.
If we consider nature in the objective sense [he writes] as an aggregate
of facts, and consider the function of art in relation to such a conception
of nature, then we can conceive art only as reproducing in some way the
specific facts. That is, indeed, the kind of relation between art and nature
which most people seem to want: but they should realize that what
they thus get is not the reality, but merely the appearance of nature.
It would seem probable that Sir Herbert's conception of 'appear
ance and reality', philosophically obscure though it is and not
clarified or explained by him, is near to the Platonic model. For after
all there have been very many great artists who have thought, with
pardonable philosophical heedlessness, if you wish, that behind
appearances, partly hidden and partly revealed by them, was a reality
that, in their art, they might somehow convey. But they have been
representational artists (and in this, as we shall see, they have been
better philosophers than Sir Herbert) : baffling though appearances
might be, they are some clue, they have thought, to 'reality'; in any
case they are all the clue there is, and certainly, even were there to be
other clues in intelligence itself or in a priori and transcendental
reflexion, they are all the clues that painters and sculptors have to do
with, seeing that their business (if art has a province of its own,
which Plato did not think and perhaps Sir Herbert agrees with him)
is of its very nature with the visible and the sensuous.
But Sir Herbert is obstinate in his belief that reality is not revealed
by appearance. Or is he? His philosophy of it is perhaps confused.
'Reality underlies appearances' in such a way and is of such a nature
(at any rate in the essay on Ben Nicholson) that it can be properly
conceived of as being of a 'mathematical and crystalline nature', the
object of a special sort of 'intuition' (for it is because he is 'something
of a mystic', he claims, that Ben Nicholson has access to this reality),
and its apprehension and expression are as abstract as is music. But
what is Sir Herbert thinking of here? Is he seriously thinking that the
'reality behind appearances' is circles and squares, which are the
proper object of pure intelligence, or is he saying that the structure
of the visible world exhibits certain geometrical and mathematical,
certain abstract, harmonies, and that it is these that an abstract artist
such as Ben Nicholson makes visible to us? In spite of the talk about
BEN NICHOLSON 273
some species of mystical insight the former is too wild a supposition,
and his reference to Nicholson as drawing his intuition of nature not
out of a vacuum but out of a mind attuned to the specific forms of
nature, by which he appears to mean 'the proportions and harmonies
inherent in all natural phenomena', suggests that the second supposi
tion is the correct one.
But if it is, it is comparatively trite, and the argument holds some
fallacies. Let us consider it.
It is trite to say that nature has a mathematical structure and that a
painter may have some intuition of it. So trite is it, and of so many
artists may it be said, that it serves not at all to discriminate one artist
against others as being a special sort of artist, namely an abstract
painter, nor does it serve to distinguish non-representational from
representational artists. To take an obvious example, Piero della
Francesca was very much aware of the mathematical structure of
the universe, but- and here he displayed a philosophical clarity of
mind superior to that possessed by Sir Herbert-he used his know
ledge in an art that is not abstract in Sir Herbert's sense (i.e. not non-
representational) and in so doing he used language as language is
properly used, that is to say, he used it to speak of things other and
more interesting than language itself. Let me explain more fully.
Firstly, since, as Plato impressively showed, the visible circle is but
an imitation of the Ideal* circle which is the 'reality', it is not at all
clear why, in order to give material form to the intuition of mathe
matical structure or to express the essential nature of reality, there is
an advantage in an art which is 'abstract', i.e. non-representational,
over an art which is not; it is not clear what advantage there is in
circles and squares, in as abstract a delineation as is humanly possible
of sheer formal harmony, over the expression of this same harmony
in terms, let us say, of the human figure. The former imitates
'reality' in Sir Herbert's sense no more than does the latter. The
latter does it no less accurately, or need not do so-although it must
be granted that on Sir Herbert's philosophy of the matter the choice,
when we are serious and concerned with 'reality' and not just 'the
appearance of nature', is between Ben Nicholson on the one hand
and Piero and Alma Tadema indifferently on the other-and it does
both what Sir Herbert thinks important and expresses a wide range
of experience as well
274 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Recognition of formal harmonies and hard mathematical structure
is a tool, no doubt the major tool, of the painter's craft. But we use
tools to make things; it is not self-evident that their proper or their
best use is to engrave statements about themselves, about what sorts
of tools they are. No doubt at times when artists have lost the
standards of their craft and content themselves with anecdotage or
emotive illustration of appealing subject-matters, as was the case,
both in England and France, for much of the nineteenth century,
there is an imperative need for painters to concern themselves, in this
way, with the sheer grammar and syntax of painting (although in
fact in the nineteenth century the great painters did not choose this
road), just as at times when it is realized that considerable linguistic
confusion befogs the discussion of philosophical problems it is
natural and right that philosophers should talk about language itself.
So, too, at such a time, it is natural and perhaps right, cathartically,
although otherwise it is absurd, to declare that all poetry, and all art,
aspires to the condition of music. But even at times such as these
philosophers, delve as deeply as they may into the perplexities of
words, use ordinary words to do it, and this they do because there
is of course nothing else to use. But so, too, t/painting and sculpture
have a province of their own and are not attempting to do in a
peculiar way what philosophers or mathematicians do in their own
way, if they are not, that is to say, concerned with objects of pure
thought such as the geometer's circle, then this is because they are
visual arts; and if they are visual arts, then the proper, and in fact the
only, language that they can use to probe 'reality' is the language of
the visible and sensuous natural world. There is no other language
available to them. 'Reality is appearance,' a distinguished recent
artist used to say, and the adage is philosophically sounder than the
premise of Sir Herbert's philosophy of abstract art.
The analogy of music cannot be sustained in this connexion. For
the language of music is quite a different kind of language from that
of painting. Perhaps there are likenesses that may be useful for some
purposes, but for Sir Herbert's purpose they are obliterated by the
manifest differences. One crucial test brings out one relevant
difference clearly enough. On the one hand there is a manifest
kinship between the forms of Mantegna and those of the natural
world (of appearances); on the other hand, when music endeavours
BEN NICHOLSON 275
to be representational in the sense of rendering the sounds of farm
yard or of factory, it becomes clearly absurd: we recognize that to
render the noises of the farmyard or of the factory is not the
musician's proper business.
In fact the philosophy of abstract art, in all the inflation of its
currency and the high-flown and tense seriousness of its diction, is
unsound from top to bottom. It may be that some day Sir Herbert,
to take its most illustrious contemporary advocate, will elucidate his
obscurities and cash his words; some day, perhaps, he will tell us
why it is that, as a matter of philosophical aesthetics, Alma Tadema
is brother to Piero della Francesca and why neither belongs to the
family of artists that gives us reality and not appearance. At any rate,
although, as I have said Plato's position in this matter is clear, Sir
Herbert's is not.
What remains is something so simple and elementary that it hardly
deserves the superstructure of turgid theory that has too often been
imposed upon it. The mind of Ben Nicholson is a mind 'which has
stored within it a full awareness of the proportions and harmonies
inherent in all natural phenomena'. As I have already said, so had
Piero's and there is no reason to believe that the skeleton is 'more
real' than the man. It may be that one is interested in skeletons more
than in men, but it is not an interest that has cosmic implications.
If, however, one is concerned with formal harmonies at their most
naked (I will not say at their purest), then the artistic activity that
will give scope to this narrowly delimited interest is the sort of
activity that one engages in when one arranges the furniture of a
room and hangs it and fixes the curtains. The analogy of architecture,
as Sir Herbert says, is to the point, but, as he rightly comments, 4 in
this case there is a functional aspect which introduces a certain
complication'. The same comment would rightly be made of furni
ture designing. Nearer still, perhaps, because here the functional
interference is of the slightest, would be the designing of a front
door, the shape, size, proportions and relations of the panels, in
relation to each other and to the knocker and the letter-box. The
analogy of hanging and arranging a room, however, is perhaps the
closest and purest analogy, and it serves also to emphasize the kind
of aesthetic satisfaction that is in question.
It is indeed the satisfaction that comes from the perception of
2j6 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
harmonious proportions and relationships. Yet here again it is worth
observing that even this satisfaction, although it approaches the
satisfactions of elegance and order and economy that a mathe
matician may find in his theorems, is sharply distinct from the satis
faction that attends the geometer's study of circles and squares and
curves. For this study is, to repeat, purely intellectual, and circles and
curves are objects of intelligence only. In the ordering of a room we
are not at all considering the properties of curves of such and such a
curvature; even here we are attentive to what the curves are the
curves of, and it makes a difference whether they are the curves of a
swag or of a table. For the pure curve is the object of pure intelli
gence; the curve that satisfies aesthetically is the visual curve, and the
visual curve is the curve of something visual, seen or imagined. There
is nothing peculiar about this; it cannot be other than what it is.
Of this nature, then, is the satisfaction afforded by good abstract
art. Visual satisfaction of this kind is genuine and can be intense, and
is its own justification, but as my analogies suggest it is doubtful
whether it is a satisfaction from which we can elicit the cosmological
or other metaphysical implications that Sir Herbert so persistently
claims. The truth is that these implications do not merge from any
analysis; they are unconsciously introduced into the theory of
abstract art according to an ideology. 'By abstraction,' writes Sir
Herbert, 'we mean what is derived or disengaged from nature, the
pure or essential form abstracted from the concrete details/ 1 The
sentence is proffered as a description of current usage that has
'sufficient scientific validity'. In fact, as the occurrence of the
adjectives 'pure' and 'essential' shows, it is nearer a moral judgement;
at the very least the dice are already heavily loaded.
Of course, visual satisfactions are not arbitrary. On the whole,
were six independent judges asked to grade a dozen of Nicholson's
abstracts in order of excellence, their awards would be found
approximately to tally. So too is it with food and wine; the con
noisseurs tend to agree. Agreement such as this suggests indeed that
there are some constants in the constitution of the human palate and
guts, as there are in the constitution of the visual apparatus. But of
metaphysical implications there are none.
1 'Realism and Abstraction in Modern Art', an essay in 'The Philosophy of
Modern Art', 1952.
BEN NICHOLSON 277
My analogy of the satisfactions of the palate is not a flippant one.
Indeed were we to proceed to ask why it is that we experience as
much pleasure as we do from the contemplation of balance and
proportion in the disposition of masses, of relations of verticals and
horizontals, of the curved line and the straight, of colours and of
tones, the account of the matter that most commends itself to my
own reflexion on the experience is substantially the restricted
application of a form of the theory of empathy which, in 1914,
Geoffrey Scott outlined in 'The Architecture of Humanism'. Its
basis, the underlying mechanism of these pleasures, is physical
function and muscular activity. It is not that physical states enter into
visual satisfaction, which is primarily a pleasure of mind, but that
physical states, or the suggestion of them, are a necessary pre
condition of visual satisfaction of this kind. So, for example, 'any
emphasis upon vertical lines immediately awakens in us a sense of
upward direction, and lines which are spread-horizontal lines -
convey suggestions of rest'. 1 Consciousness of serenity, of restless
ness, of weight, of density-all these are elements of the satisfaction
that we have from abstract art, and all of them, I think, ultimately
derive from the ordinary physical functions, movement and the
ability to stand, and so on, of the human body.
The humanist instinct [to quote Geoffrey Scott once more] looks into
the world for physical conditions that are related to our own, for move
ments which are like those we enjoy, for resistances that resemble those
that can support us, for a setting where we should be neither lost nor
thwarted. It looks, therefore, for certain masses, lines, and spaces, tends
to create them and recognise their fitness when created. And, by our
instinctive imitation of what we see, their seeming fitness becomes our
real delight.
It is not to my purpose to develop this or any theory, still less to
demonstrate if it were susceptible of demonstration. It is a reason
able account of the matter which certainly cannot be refuted, and
serves well to emphasize what are the springs of the real, although
modest, pleasures that abstract art affords: straightforward visual
satisfactions, rooted indeed in humanity but with no mystical or
cosmic overtones. You will look in vain for metaphysical revela
tions of the structure of reality from Ben Nicholson.
As a way of looking at the world, a Vision', if this claim is to be
1 Geoffrey Scott, 'The Architecture of Humanism', CkVm ('Humanist Values').
278 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
allowed, abstract art is remarkable for what it overlooks. Any
artist's way of looking at the world is inevitably selective. But, as I
have commented earlier, all great artists of the past have used know
ledge of the hard and mathematical structure of the world to say
other things about it; their awareness, in other words, has included
the abstract Vision' and embraced a multitude of other aspects of
the world as well. So far indeed is the abstract artists' apprehension
from being a 'full' one, as Sir Herbert makes out, that it is (and also
by definition) the most narrowly restrictive in history.
There are genuine enjoyments to be had from abstract painting
such as that of Nicholson, and they need no ulterior, no non-visual
justification; they are their own justification. But to make for them
mystical claims that scrutiny explodes is to do the painter a dis
service; for it is to falsify and to erode the very satisfaction that he
has it in him to give.
Abstract art is even justified, according to some critics, as a fruit
of the spiritual life. Concluding a discussion of Ben Nicholson, in
which he had declared that 'the only possible re-presentation of an
abstract painting in words must be either poetry or metaphysics' and
in which he had reasserted the customary theme of the potential
hindrance to painting from the side of representation, Mr. Anthony
Bertram wrote that when once the point is taken that representation
is only a dispensable aid to painting 'Nicholson's work then becomes
crystal clear, for its peculiar genius is of a white purity and most
tender and sensitive simplicity. It is the simplicity, not of the
simpleton, but of the man who has learnt what is unnecessary and
has thrown away the clutter: it is the simplicity of the saint.' 1 But
simplicity is an essential attribute of sanctity, the perfection and the
goal of human life, in an obvious sense in which it is not obvious
that representation is as easily dispensed with, in the interest of the
perfection and the goal of painting, as clutter. In fact, as I have argued
earlier, the 'clutter' of, say, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo is as
integral to the forms that they created as it is to our response to them.
Nor is it irrelevant to add that to discard clutter, in Mr. Bertram's
sense, is not only to discard worlds of experience and the only material
an artist has to work with; it is also to sacrifice what would appear to
be an essential condition of great art. For such an art is inseparable, in
1 'A Century of British Painting, 1851-1951', 1951, p. 99.
BEN NICHOLSON 279
its genesis, from mastery of prima facie recalcitrant material, 'material',
as Mr. Wyndham Lewis wrote in another context, 'in struggle against
which the greatest things in the world have been constructed'. 1 There
is no canonizable sacrifice or simplicity for a saint that stops short of
coming to grips with a refractory self; nor is there for an artist short
of coming to grips with a refractory visible material.
Were abstract artists and their advocates content to allow that
abstract art is an expression in the simplest terms of balance and
proportion and the other elements I mentioned just now, from the
contemplation of which pleasure is to be derived, the incompre
hension and the hostility which is so often provoked by this art
would be dissipated. But whether from an anti-humanist repugnance
for the natural world, or from an unconscious apprehension that if
this apparently esoteric art were admitted to be derived from so
simple a source it might cause it to be discounted, the fact is that the
advocates of abstract art consistently claim for it a metaphysical or
mystical basis. 'To treat Nicholson's work as purely decorative, a
mere sensuous pleasure to the eye ... is also an insult to the painter
or a confession of failure on the part of the critic.' 2 Kandinsky
entitled his book on abstract painting 'The Spiritual in Art'. E. H.
Ramsden-on other occasions an illuminating critic-was content to
begin, and to end, an article on the subject of this study with the
words 'Ben Nicholson is a Constructivist. He comes from both sides
of the Tweed.' 3 As the subject was an abstract artist, this was accepted
as part of the inevitable accompaniment of mystification. Imagine,
however, what her readers would have thought had she begun, and
ended, an article on the father with the words 'William Nicholson
was a Realist. He came from both sides of the Trent.' Ben Nichol
son, it seems to me, lends himself to the process of mystification
when he subtitles Fra Angelica 4 ' a still-life of 1945 representing a jug,
a bottle, and two wine-glasses.
Were the spectator not mystified or provoked, when abstract art
is in question, by cosmic or metaphysical claims, he would have little
difficulty in discerning the good qualities in the best, in that of
Nicholson in particular. Once his painting is seen as a series of essays
1 'The Art of Being Ruled 1 , p. 390. 2 Anthony Bertram, loc. cit.
8 'Ben Nicholson: Constructivism*. 'The Studio', December 1945-
4 Coll the Artist. Reproduced plate 145 in 'Ben Nicholson: paintings, reliefs,
drawings'.
280 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
in the serenely harmonious arrangement of rectangles and circles,
calculated with a beautiful precision, exquisite in finish, and coolly
elegant in style, and its appeal as not esoteric but addressed to the
universal delight in such relations between forms, a delight of which
not only painters, sculptors, architects, but craftsmen and designers
as well are inevitably aware, there would be no difficulty and no
resistance. A visit to an exhibition of abstracts by Nicholson affords
something of the same kind of pleasure as a visit to a well-designed
yacht: about both there is the same exhilarating sense of things being
streamlined, well made, light and fresh.
Very many of his compositions are based upon the simple prin
ciple of securing equilibrium by the balancing of a larger, simpler,
more lightly coloured rectangle, or complex of rectangles, by a
smaller but richer and more complicated unit. This simple principle
is employed with much subtlety and variety, but careful scrutiny of
the artist's work will reveal the invariable importance of the part it
plays. This delicate equilibrium is sometimes achieved by the very
simplest means. During the 'thirties and 'forties, renouncing the aid
of colour, he constructed his static harmonies by excavating shallow
reliefs out of wooden or synthetic boards, which he covered with an
even coating of unrelieved white. These Paul Nash hailed as 'the
discovery of something like a new world'. 1 But Nicholson's pro
cedure involved, surely, the ultimate step in the renunciation of an
old world rather than the discovery of a new. These snow-white
harmonies, of which a good example is White Relief 1935* (Plate 27),
calculated to a hair's breadth, represent more completely than any
of his other works the ultimate exercise of his 'power to deny, dis
card and eliminate'. They represent, too, I think, the farthest limits to
which Abstraction has effectively been pushed. In these white panels
Nicholson has probably extracted the fullest possibilities from an art
narrowed to the point of extinction by successive renunciations.
Ben Nicholson has often been derisively contrasted with his father,
sometimes as a pioneer who moves in regions undreamed of by his
father, sometimes as a cranky prodigal son. But in fact how much
there is in common between the work of father and son. Neither
belongs in any radical sense to the race of pioneers; each accepted a
mode of expression current in his day, and each used his dexterity, his
1 Op. cit. 2 The Tate Gallery, London.
.
2
O X
a
o
BEN NICHOLSON 28l
pertinacity, but above all an almost impeccable taste, to bring it to a
dandyish perfection. Indeed there is one part of the father's work that
directly affected the son. The posters which with his brother-in-law
James Pryde the father designed under the pseudonym of the Beggar-
staffs, with their large yet precisely calculated areas of audaciously
empty space, impressed Ben Nicholson at an early age, and may well
have implanted in him the idea from which his own art of mono
chrome areas was to grow. Nicholson is fully aware of what he owes
to inheritance and early environment. He believes that, as he once
put it, something fierce and northern in his mother's temperament
counteracted in some degree the effect of his father's sophistication.
I referred earlier, in contrasting the temperament of Nicholson
with that of Mondriaan, to its being instinctive rather than intellec
tual. Nothing could be more misleading than to represent Nicholson
as doctrinaire, or indeed subject to any rigid principles. On several
occasions I have heard him express resentment at the suggestion that
he paints in accord with theories. 'It's nonsense,' he says, 'and all
dogma, in any case, is harmful.' I am convinced that the delight he
takes in the creation of abstract forms arises from an inner necessity.
But Nicholson is not a pioneer, but a man of skill and taste who has
brought to a peculiar degree of perfection a form of abstract painting
already extensively practised before he became a painter. His is not
an art based upon a particular theory; it is the product of a tempera
ment stimulated and shaped by the abstract movement widely
diffused in Europe and America during his formative years. Ben
Nicholson is not an innovator, still less a revolutionary, but the most
accomplished living practitioner of a new academism. A movement
so shallow in its underlying philosophy is unlikely to have a long
life, but the best of Nicholson's works will surely survive the ebb
of the abstract tide.
There is a circumstance-largely of abstract artists' making- which
opposes an easy relation between abstract art and the public. While
they are apt to belittle the 'easel picture' as an obsolete 'bourgeois'
conception, they continue to paint 'easel pictures' themselves, and to
title, frame and display them in the traditional fashion. They thereby
challenge comparison with 'easel pictures' which represent, directly
or imaginatively, the world of our actual experience. No system of
'purified constructive elements' setting up 'pure relations' is able, in
282 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the long run, to engross and exhilarate as a work of art which
represents a profound view of man's experience of the world. To
title an arrangement of 'purified constructive elements' Woman or
Fra Angelico, as though they recognizably represented a woman or a
painter-priest, cannot but sharpen the detached spectator's sense of
the inadequacies in abstract art.
Had abstract painters refrained from challenging the 'easel
picture' and directed their efforts towards decoration, their work
would have exercised a stronger appeal and would have avoided
confusing and alienating comparisons. This is a sphere in which
abstract painting is accepted without question, just as the abstract
character of the architecture which it embellishes is accepted. The
effect of abstract forms, serene or dynamic, painted on walls, on
screens, on surfaces which serve as backgrounds rather than as
objects for scrutiny, would be to dignify and animate the act of
living, just as fine architecture does. Abstract art is not a precise means
of communication, and it is the pretence that it is that has perverted
and strained a mode of expression which might serve an invaluable
purpose. The sharp, singing colour, the precise and subtle sense of
relations between forms, and the freshness that mark Ben Nicholson
at his happiest- what a serenely exhilarating life they could bring,
for instance, to the walls of a room of small or moderate size! The
least susceptible would not be insensitive to its radiant influence -and
there would be no need for esoteric explanation or defence. For one
reason and another it is expected to-day that art should be an
expression of an individual, and neither artist nor public is willing
that it should take its place as part of the background of living. Once
the musician was content that his music, emanating from some
hidden source, should enchant without holding all attention; to-day
he insists upon applause at brief intervals, which upon the slenderest
pretext he must acknowledge with a personal appearance. If the art
of painter and sculptor, and in particular the abstract painter and
sculptor, were enabled to exercise its influence upon the passer-by,
catching him, as it were, off his guard and only half-consciously
absorbed, that influence would be deeper and more pervasive than it
is in this day of the 'private view' and the 'personal appearance'. Ben
Nicholson's painting should be seen as Handel's 'Water Music' was
first heard, by a crowd of people pursuing their ordinary avocations.
WILLIAM ROBERTS
b. 1895
PAINTERS differ widely in the degree of their versatility;
they differ, too, in the variety of their development. Of great
versatility examples abound. There were few activities, creative,
speculative or scientific, in which Leonardo da Vinci did not at one
time or another engage. In Alfred Stevens we have an English artist
able to design a railway train and to paint a miniature, to decorate
the walls of a palace, to carry out a huge equestrian sculpture and to
design for industry. Among the painters who are the subjects of
these studies are those who show a versatility, modest certainly in its
range compared with that of Leonardo or Stevens but nevertheless
impressive. Wyndham Lewis, for example, who as a satirist and a
philosopher has shown qualities that posterity may consider attri
butes of genius; and Duncan Grant, who has designed costumes and
scenery for the theatre and decorated walls, furniture, textiles,
pottery and much else.
It is not less easy to point to artists whose work, in the course of
their lives, has undergone radical change. It would be difficult for
someone ignorant of Turner to recognize one of the elegant, con
ventional topographical water-colours of his youth, one of the
grandiose canvasses painted in his middle years, in rivalry with Claude
or some other master, and one of the chromatic fantasies of his last
years as works by the same hand. The growth of the art of Corot
and of Van Gogh- to name two at random- offer examples of con
trasts equally striking.
There exist, however, artists of a different kind, who are not
versatile and whose work changes little: artists who early in their
lives discover a single, exclusive preoccupation. Constable's painting
became looser and more emphatic as the years passed, but the subject
and the aim did not change. Char din's consistency of aim and method
is more obvious still. It was noted in the first volume of these studies,
that by the middle nineteen-twenties, not long after his delayed
beginning as a painter, Matthew Smith had found the essentials of
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284 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
his style, which has altered insignificandy since; that he had found,
too, the subjects which have engrossed him for the remainder of his
life. Allusion has also been made in the present volume to the
extraordinary consistency of the imagination of Stanley Spencer.
But there are painters far less versatile and changeful than these two.
Ben Nicholson's themes have been few and his treatment of them
has varied little. But beside Roberts even the puritanical and rigid
figure of Nicholson appears dissipated and capricious. Early in life
Roberts discovered the narrow range of subjects he wished to
represent, and precisely how he wished to represent them, and to
these discoveries he has remained grimly faithful.
William Patrick Roberts was born in Hackney, London, on 5 June
1895, the third child of Edward Roberts, a carpenter, and his wife
Emma, born Collins, both Londoners. When William Roberts was
about twelve or thirteen years old he wanted to be a painter. His
father, whose love of his own craft led him to sympathize with his
son's wish to follow another craft, made him an easel and a drawing
board. Thus equipped he drew constantly, 'thinking', he once told
me, 'of nothing but drawing'. He attended a local school, which he
left at the age of fourteen to be apprenticed for seven years to Sir
Joseph Cawston, the printers and law stationers. He looked forward
to designing posters, but at first he was allowed to assist only in the
mixing of colours. Later he had some pleasure in making com
positions and designs for poster advertising projects, but he showed
no aptitude for lettering. Opportunities to participate in such pro
jects were rare, however, for his principal occupations were prepar
ing the workmen's lunches, buying cakes for their teas and the like.
On the advice of the art mistress of a local school he attended classes
after working hours at the St. Martin's School of Art, then in Endell
Street, Drury Lane. Here he won a London County Council
scholarship that enabled him to go to the Slade and he was released
after serving only one year of his apprenticeship.
At the Slade-where he remained from his sixteenth to his twentieth
year-his mind opened out and his powerful draughtsmanship was
recognized. In the Print Room at the British Museum where he spent
much time he met Laurence Binyon, its benevolent and scholarly
Keeper, who introduced him to Fry. After the first Post-Impres
sionist exhibition the curiosity about Fry's ideas which prevailed
'? I
WILLIAM ROBERTS 285
among the students of the Slade was enhanced by the hostility
towards them shown by Tonks. Roberts had visited this notorious
exhibition, and his introduction to Fry led to his working, part-
time, at the Omega Workshops, where he designed and decorated
boxes, paper-knives and other knick-knacks. It was Fry who drew
Roberts in a general way within the orbit of the Post-Impressionist
movement, but he affected him in no more specific fashion. After he
left the Omega 'I was no longer interested/ he told me, 'in the
work of anyone who worked there.' There was one artist, however,
who like himself had a brief experience of the Omega and whose
work, even before he met him, took a powerful hold upon his
imagination. This was Wyndham Lewis. His impact upon Roberts
was heavy but beneficial. The effect upon a temperament different
from Roberts's of association with the dynamically didactic leader
of Vorticism and editor of 'Blast' might have been stultifying, but
although its immediate consequence for Roberts was the production
of paintings and drawings easily mistaken for those of Lewis, it
revealed to Roberts the nature of his talents and set him on the road
on which he has travelled to this day. In all essentials his art is iden
tical with the art which he evolved as soon as he ceased to be a mere
imitator of Lewis. On several occasions Lewis claimed, with regard
to T. E. Hulme, that 'what he said should be done, I did'. I do not
know precisely what relation there was between Roberts and Hulme.
They met no doubt at the Rebel Art Centre, with which Roberts
became associated after his departure from the Omega; but it is
unlikely that Roberts, who has shown little inclination for intellec
tual discussion and indeed little interest in the operations of the
intellect, should have been directly affected by Hulme's theories.
Nevertheless Roberts might have claimed, with no less justification
than Lewis, that he did what Hulme said should be done. In place
of the naturalistic art of the nineteenth century Hulme advocated an
art 'where everything tends to be angular, where curves tend to be
hard and geometrical, where the presentation of the human body . . .
is often entirely non-vital, and distorted to fit into stiff lines and
cubical shapes . . J l and which 'exhibits no delight in nature and no
striving after vitality. Its forms are always what can be described as
stiff and lifeless/ 2 This might serve as a description of the painting
1 'Speculations', p. 82. 2 Ibid., p. 85.
286 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
of Roberts. To complete it not much need be added except a few
words about his subjects.
If theories from the mouth of a philosopher meant little to
Roberts, the same theories, reinforced by the capable and aggressive
practice of a brother artist, his leader and mentor, were another
matter. We may take it that Hulme's theories, developed and illus
trated by Lewis, provided both the point of departure and con
tinuing inspiration for the art of Roberts. The effect of the two-fold
influence of Hulme and Lewis was constructive and enhancing be
cause it was the seed that fell on good soil. Often an influence is a
tyranny which distorts by its power or bemuses by its charm, and its
subject cannot become himself until he frees himself from his sub
servience. But Hulme's and Lewis's influence was not a tyranny but
an illumination that revealed to young Roberts, who was tempera
mentally tough, rigid, unsubtle, sardonic, joyless and unresponsive,
precisely how tough, rigid, unsubtle, sardonic and joyless he was and
taught him how to make out of a rather charmless combination of
qualities a remarkable art. Above all it taught him to disregard the
profusion, the growth, the movement, the distorting atmosphere,
the deceptive surface, in fact, all that vast variety and changefulness
of the world of nature which to a Constable or a Monet was the
whole of reality, and to endeavour not to imitate or to interpret
nature but to create forms based upon a narrow range of carefully
selected natural shapes and to endow them through his art with a
clarity and a rhythmic harmony entirely classical, and to make colour
neither descriptive nor functional but decorative. Such, in over
simplified terms, was the ideal which Roberts owed to Hulme and to
Lewis. No other subject of these studies has been so steadfastly loyal
to his original ideals. At times when the air has been full of talk about
the New Classicism his work has received favourable attention; at
other times-never more markedly than to-day-it has suffered
neglect, but Roberts has not altered his course.
The subject of the greater number of his pictures is cockney life.
But his cockneys-bicycling, picnicking and so forth with their racy
gestures and grimaces-are the material for an art that is in its essence
formal. His compositions derive often from those of the tougher
Florentines, and in spirit as well as form he has put more than
one critic in mind of Pollaiuolo. These often very elaborate but
WILLIAM ROBERTS 287
beautifully lucid compositions are worked out- 'engineered* was the
apt description applied by one writer to the process -with utmost
deliberation and completeness. Human beings, the subjects of almost
all his works, are represented by animated figures of an unmistakable
character: studiedly clumsy, tubular-limbed, fish-mouthed, staring-
eyed puppets, stuffed with something heavier than sawdust- lead-shot
perhaps -which makes their movements ponderous and ineffective.
They grin with a mirthless, even on occasion a brutal humour.
But their movements are ponderous and ineffective only if we
think of them as made in response to the emotions of individual
human beings; as soon as we understand them simply as contribu
tions to the harmony of the group as a whole, they become dignified
and at moment even noble. These groups of precisely related
grimacing tubular-limbed puppets perform their ponderous motions
in a space that is without atmosphere and almost a void. Not,
however, a space without limits, for there is usually a background,
explicit or implicit, which prevents these puppets straying, like a
Watteau's shepherdess, away from the foreground and keeps them
prisoners, pressed, almost, up against the surface of the picture. The
contrast between the coarse or even brutal figures and the classical
and scholarly way in which they are combined is matched by the
contrast between their character and their delicate combination of
colouring: the black, petunia-pink, sharp acid green, and pale,
chalky-blue are entirely his own.
A person reading these pages who happened to be unacquainted
with the work of Roberts might wonder at finding him included in
a small company chosen for seeming to the writer 'to have distilled
to its finest essence the response of our times to the world which the
eye sees-both the outward and the inward eye'. For the artist's work
emerges from this study as representations of puppets neither noble
nor endearing but rather absurd in their brutality and mirthlessness
as they move clumsily within the narrow parallel between a back
curtain and the picture surface. It is indeed an art which in the bleak
ness of its total masculinity cannot be said to fulfil the ultimate
Berensonian criterion of enhancing life. Yet to ignore Roberts
would leave a gap in the tapestry which, with whatever want of
skill, I am attempting to weave. Speaking of Picasso Mr. Berenson
once said to me: 'He never remains long enough in one posture for
288 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
me to form an opinion about him/ Roberts, on the contrary, ever
since he freed himself from the imitation of the superficial aspects of
the art of Wyndham Lewis, has maintained his posture virtually
unaltered. I can sympathize with those who find it an unattractive
posture, but for me his faith, at once intense and obstinate, in the
particular angle from which he squints at the life about him, has
enabled him to create figures which live in the memory with an all
but unique persistence. I would instance such paintings as Jockeys, 1
of c. 1933, Les Rentiers* of 1933, Masks* of 1935 (Plate 28), He Knew
Degas* (an amusing portrait of Sickert) of 1939, Bicycle Boys, 5 of
1939. In an age ridden by fashion and enervated by angst the creations
of Roberts are firm-knit by a conviction which takes no account of
critics, public, or even patrons. I can imagine a man once familiar
with the London art-world of the middle decades of this century,
looking back at it after many years of distant exile, one memory
after another having faded away, able to recall at last only three
massive figures dressed in pink, bright green and prussian blue,
riding their bicycles alone on the sands of Time, the creations of
William Roberts.
1 The Cartwright Memorial Hall, Bradford.
2 The City Art Gallery, Belfast. 3 Coll. Count Vanden Heuvel.
4 Coll. Mr. Ernest Cooper. 5 Coll. Mr. Ernest Cooper.
DAVID JONES
b. 1895
IT is not often that a chronicler has the good fortune to see some
thing of a painter's beginnings, especially if the painter happens
to be his senior. But by an odd chance I had such an opportunity
in respect of the subject of these lines.
In the summer of 1926 I stayed for a week or two with Eric Gill
at Capel-y-ffin, the house in the Black Mountains of South Wales
where he had settled a few years before to escape the distracting
involvements that had been a consequence of the widespread interest
attracted by the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic and St.
Dominic's Press, which he founded at Ditchling in Sussex. A few
moments after my arrival there came into the sitting-room a small
man who, though I now know that he was thirty-one, looked not
more than twenty-four. 'Well goodbye, Eric,' he said, Tm going
now.' In my mind's eye I can still see the two of them shaking hands.
Eric Gill keen-glancing, energetic in gesture, his pedantic aggressive
ness softened by a frank and unassuming smile, and wearing his
black biretta, rough black cassock gathered in at the waist, black
stockings cross-gartered and sandals. David Jones: pale face sur
mounted by a thick ingenuous fringe; languid figure, speaking of a
pervasive quiet. I have said that he looked younger than his years,
and this was so save in one respect: his flesh was of that delicate,
tired texture generally found in old age. The dark eyes, large and
mild, had in their depths a little touch of fanaticism quite absent, for
all his aggressiveness, from Gill's. His clothes were anonymous. The
contrast between the two men was not more apparent than the
friendly understanding between them. David Jones and I were intro
duced, shook hands (his grip was soft and shyly friendly), and he
went. 'Who was that?' I asked, 'one of your apprentices?' (Gill
usually had several such in his workshops.) 'That was David Jones.
He's been learning carpentry, but he's not much good at it. But he's
a jolly good artist: a lot will be heard of him before long. Look at
this,' he said, pointing to a big water-colour lying on a table
289
290 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
representing two horses on a hillside, 'he's just finished it.' Imper-
ceptive of its qualities I gave it, nevertheless, so long and hard afook
as to imprint it on my memory. 'It's done from this window,' Gill
explained. I walked up to it and peered out, but I could see nothing
except mist lashed by driving rain. The outline of a big hill, when
adumbrated by Gill, was just perceptible. It was many years before
I saw David Jones or the drawing again, and the drawing must have
impressed me more than it seemed to at the time, because I remem
bered it so clearly. The drawing was Hill Pastures -Capel-y-ffin. 1
O O* O
According to Eric Gill Hill Pastures -Capel-y-ffin was the best of
a group of mountain landscapes made in 1926 and the previous year.
These drawings may be regarded as marking David Jones's point of
departure as a mature artist. But they may also be regarded as
marking the culmination of an apprenticeship interrupted by war
and unduly prolonged. He was backward, he has told us, at any kind
of lesson, and, though he had no enthusiasms other than drawing,
the few early examples of his work which survive offer no indica
tions of exceptional talent. The active sympathy of his parents, who
afforded his inclination every encouragement within their power,
led to no early flowering. He possessed, however, the most precious
gift of perseverance, which sustained him until he could see his way
clear. But that was many years ahead. His mother was able to help
him not only by sympathy but by example: as a young woman she
had made drawings in the tradition of the Victorian drawing-
masters, and one of his earliest recollections is of looking at three of
her crayon drawings, one of Tintern Abbey, another of a donkey's
head, and a third of a gladiator with curly hair. His father, too, had
a positive contribution to make to his formation as an artist, for
another of his childhood memories is of his father's singing Welsh
songs, 'Mae hen wlad fy nhadan' and 'Ar hyd y nos', and his telling
him of the three hills of his birth-place, Foel-y-Crio, Moel Famau,
and Moel Ffagnallt, and he has nurtured carefully the sense, first
implanted in him by his father, of belonging to the "Welsh people.
On account of his father's calling he was brought up in a home that
took the printed page and its illustration for granted.
1 Coll. Miss Helen Sutherland.
DAVID JONES 291
David Michael Jones was born on I November 1895 at Brockley
in Kent, the only child of James Jones and his wife Alice Ann,
daughter of Ebenezer Bradshaw. James Jones, a printer's manager,
was a native of Holywell, North Wales, and a son of John Jones,
master-plasterer, who came of farming stock long settled in Ysceifiog
below the Clwydian Hills. Resident in London since about 1883,
James Jones was on the staff of the Christian Herald Publishing
Company, and had worked previously on 'The Flintshire Observer'.
David Jones's mother came of an English family of Thames-side
ship-builders, and her father was a mast and block maker, of Rother-
hithe; she was of Italian extraction on her mother's side. The
presence of craftsmen among his immediate forebears on both sides
of his family counted for much in the formation of his talent, for, as
Mr. Ironside has noted in his discerning appreciation,
It has been a special object with him that his pictures should be not only
the mirror of his imagination or the translation of his sensuous im
pressions, but should also be things valuable for the very manner of
their fashioning. 1
If it was from his mother's side that he principally inherited the
disposition to translate his conceptions naturally into a form both
tangible and precious, it was from his father's that he inherited the
poetic outlook that has played so predominant a part both in his
painting and his writing, above all that peculiarly Welsh time-sense
which naturally relates the present with the remote and makes the
possessors of it in a special degree the heirs of legend. It is not so
much that David Jones has a vivid apprehension of the remote past;
of its intimate links with and relevance for the present he has a no
less vivid awareness. An illuminating example of the working in him
of this special time-sense appears at the beginning of a broadcast talk 2
of autobiographical character that he gave in 1954-
About eight hundred years ago [he said, as another might say before
the First World War] a prince of Aberffraw defeated his Welsh and
English enemies at Coleshill between Flint Sands and Halkin Mountain.
Holywell, where my father, James Jones, was born, is about three
miles north-west of the battle-site. The birth of a son to John Jones,
Plastrwr, Treflfynnon, in 1860 would indeed seem a matter having no
apparent connection with the battle won by the great Owain Gwynedd
1 'David Jones', by Robin Ironside. Penguin Modern Painters, 1949-
2 29 October.
292 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
in 1149. But however unapparent, the connection is real enough; for
that victory symbolised the recovery of a tract of Britain that had been
in English possession for well over three centuries. Had that twelfth-
century recovery not occurred the area around Holywell would have
remained within the Mercian zone of influence. In which case its
inhabitants would, centuries since, have become wholly English in
tradition, nomenclature and feeling. Had local history taken that
course, it follows that I should not now be speaking to you at the
invitation of the Welsh B.B.C., as an artist of Welsh affinities. You see
by what close shaves some of us are what we are, and you see how
accidents of long past history can be of importance to us in the most
intimate sense, and can determine integral things about us.
He has chosen to identify himself with one of the smallest of
European peoples, yet he exemplifies the truth of the saying that
only through being local can something become universal. Through
his happy acceptance of his Welsh ancestry and his London ante
cedents and all that these involve of the insular and even the pro
vincial, his imagination reaches out to encompass a vast range of
European consciousness But this disposition thus to reach out was
roused and continuously nourished by an event which had nothing
to do with this pre-history.
David Jones tells us that he was slow in learning to read, 'finding
his letters difficult at the age of nine and later, but that he made good
this lack on more than one occasion by paying his sister a penny to
read to him'. 1 'In drawing, 5 the same writer continues, 'he was
certainly no laggard.' No laggard in that he applied himself
assiduously to his chosen pursuit (chosen largely, he says, 'as a
counterweight to my deficiency in all else'), 2 but he remained for
years a wanderer unsure what path to follow. A few of his very early
drawings survive. One of these-not the earliest, but the first he
positively remembers making-of a Dancing Bear* seen in the street
at Brockley was of 1902, when he was seven. Here pity for the great
muzzled captive, led to prance for pennies in the gutter, is un
erringly conveyed. Here, too, are clear intimations of his mature
1 John Petts. Introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of paintings, drawings
and engravings by David Jones, arranged by the Welsh Committee of The Arts
Council, 1954. 2 This, and unless otherwise indicated, all other quotations in the
text are taken from manuscript autobiographical notes written by the artist at the
suggestion of Mr. H. S. Ede, by whom copies have been presented to the Library
of the Tate Gallery. 3 Coll. the Artist.
29. DAVID JONES. Aphrodite in Aulis (1941).
Pen, ink and water-colour, 24! x i^J in. Private collection,
DAVID JONES 293
way of drawing, the modelling with touches which at first glance
seem weak and almost irrelevant, but which, on scrutiny, are seen
to be so purposeful; there are intimations, too, in the character of the
pencil strokes themselves. Yet in quality this beautiful drawing
(which with a number of his other early animal drawings was
exhibited at the Royal Drawing Society) would not appear to be
typical of his early work. This was confined to animals: lions, tigers,
wolves, bears, cats, deer, mostly in conflict. 'Only the very earliest
of these,' he says, 'show any sensitivity, or have any interest, what
soever/
The untempted integrity of childhood quickly gave way to the
vulgarizing influence of the illustrations to boys' magazines, old
Royal Academy catalogues, and 'the general dead weight of outside
opinion'. In imitation of what he found in such publications he made
many drawings of mediaeval Welshmen with wolf-hounds on
mountains, Russians surrounded by wolves in snow-storms and
the like. A photograph of a drawing, Wolf in The Snow, of 1900,
which may be said to fall within this group, survives. It is without
merit.
Many students leave their art schools without learning anything
from the instruction provided. What they learn they learn from the
example of artists whose work they revere, or from fellow-students.
The teaching at the Slade, I fancy, played a negligible part in the
formation of Ben Nicholson. Of David Jones the contrary is true.
At Camberwell Art School (which he attended from 1909 to 1915)
he was promptly rescued from the disintegrating effects of 'the dead
weight of outside opinion' manifest in the illustrations which,
ignorant of better, he had taken as his models. The effect of the
instruction, of A. S. Hartrick, Reginald Savage and Herbert Cole
was to rekindle the lights of childhood. Through Hartxick, who had
known Gauguin and Van Gogh, he was first made aware of the
modern movement in French painting, and through Savage of the
Pre-Raphaelites and the great Victorian illustrators, Pinwell,
Sandys and Beardsley. The sudden widening of horizon that he
owed to these enlightened teachers enriched without clarifying his
imagination; his sense of vocation was enhanced; yet it remained
without particular object. The beginning of the First World War
found him vacillating between alternative ambitions to become an
294 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
illustrator of historical subjects, preferably Welsh, and a painter of
animals. It found him, too, he has told us, 'completely muddle-
headed as to the function of the arts in general'. On 2 January 1915
he enlisted in London in The Royal Welch Fusiliers, serving with
them as a private soldier on the Western Front from December 1915
until March 1918, being demobilized at the end of that year. The
terrible ordeal of prolonged trench warfare brought forth no
immediate expression. None of the many sketches that he made in
trench and billet have any interest as drawings, he says, and little as
records, being feeble impressionistic sketches. . . . 'They are without
any sense of form and they display no imagination. . . . But the War
landscape-the "Wasteland" motif,' he adds, 'has remained with me,
I think as a potent influence, to assert itself later/ It was just twenty
years later that this and all the imaginative experience that he won
from the ordeal asserted itself not, except in a very few instances, in
drawings or engravings, but in a work of literature, 'In Paren
thesis', 'certainly a "golden bough",' as Mr. Ironside observes, 'to
have cut from such a blasted wood'. This book and the later 'The
Anathemata', of 1953, express even more explicitly than anything
else he has made his ever pervasive sense of the intimacy between
present and past, and between history and legend.
With many-hued threads he weaves all three into a delicately
shimmering unity, ennobling the present, though without sup
pression of its meannesses, bringing history near and making legend
actual. 'In Parenthesis' comprises a series of descriptions of scenes of
regimental life in France, mostly in the trenches. It differs from other
'war books' in that the events and scenes which form its principal
subject are enveloped in a diaphanous web of legend: the language
of the trenches mingles with the language of many different kinds of
legend and of many periods of history. Both the imagery and the
language of this most literary of 'war books' are gathered from
innumerable sources, from the Welsh heroes of Aneirin's sixth-
century epic, from 'The Song of Roland', and from Malory, Milton,
Coleridge, Joyce, Hopkins, Welsh Methodist hymn-books, 'The
Golden Bough', but most often from 'the frozen regions of the
Celtic underworld', from the Arthurian legend and from the Catholic
liturgy. Characteristic of David Jones's interweaving of past and
present is the closing image, in which the dead lie decorated with
DAVID JONES 295
flowers, fruit and foliage, picked for them by the presiding spirit of
the woods in which they fought their last battle:
The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering.
These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for
each their fragile prize.
She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what's due
to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-men. She knows
who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down.
Some she gives white berries
some she give brown
Emile has a curious crown it's
made of golden saxifrage.
Fatty wears sweet-briar,
he will reign with her for a thousand years.
For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.
Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand.
That swine Lilly white has daisies to his chain - you'd hardly credit it.
She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr. Jenkins and Billy
Grower.
Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they lie in
serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.
Sion gets St. John's Wort- that's fair enough.
Dai Great-coat, she can't find him anywhere-she calls both high and
low, she had a very special one for him.
The mass of imagery gathered from so many sources for the con
struction of "In Parenthesis', however obscurely it may glimmer on
first acquaintance, is in fact presented in the framework of a rational
and clearly apprehended world order. Of the existence of such a
framework, however, at the time of his experience of the Western
Front, David Jones had no faintest intimation.
After demobilization in 1919 he resumed his art studies with the
aid of a Government grant, this time at the Westminster School, of
which Walter Bayes was the headmaster. The years in the army had
sharpened his sense of vocation, and he went to Westminster eager
to paint again.
It would have been singular if returning to his apprenticeship
ardently but without settled convictions David Jones should not have
been attracted by the illustrious figures of the School of Paris and by
their transforming achievements. But in spite of all this attraction
he has always, then as now, treated this School with a certain reserve
296 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
~a reserve in which attentive respect is untouched by submissiveness.
Yet its effect on his formation is manifest. Without it he could
hardly have evolved the freedom- whether to simplify or to com
plicate his subject-that is so consistent a feature of his mature style.
He began to take an interest, too, in the ideas and the work of the
English artists in which were manifest the movements theorized in
Paris. Yet it was consistent with his acutely developed sense of the
past that his deepest enthusiasms should have been reserved not for
contemporaries but for ancestors: for two of the great figures in that
mystical tradition in painting towards which he was groping his
way: Blake and El Greco. The first appearance, in 1919, on the walls
of the National Gallery, of El Greco's Agony in the Garden stirred
him deeply.
Not less valuable than the quickening and deepening of his ideas
about the ends of his art was the enhanced awareness, which he
owed also to his years at Westminster, of the importance of ways
and means. He is conscious of a particular debt to Walter Bayes for
his insistence upon his students' need of acquiring the science of their
profession- the same need was taught by Bernard Meninsky, whose
life-class he attended.
The principal effect of these influences was vastly to intensify his
spiritual and intellectual activity. He had come to Westminster, as
he has told us, 'with an open mind', susceptible of influence, respect
ful of teaching. After a couple of years or so his mind, for so long
cramped by the alternation of action and boredom in a soldier's life,
had leapt into vigorous exercise, and he was placing himself and all
his ends and means in the widest context. It was a mind no longer
open, for it had already reached some conclusions about first causes.
Some years earlier, some time, he thinks, in 1917, and in the neigh
bourhood of Ypres, he found himself wondering about the Catholic
tradition. On 7 September 1921 he was received into the Catholic
Church. The effect of his religious experience and of the teachings
of the Church, clarifying and deepening his thinking, has been
to add strength and precision to the arts he practises by giving
them the context of a world order of things. The insistence of the
Church on the reality and goodness of matter and spirit, wedding
form and content, the tradition that declares 'that in each particular
the general should shine out and without the particular there can be
30. DAVID JONES Vexilla Regis (1947),
Water-colour, 30 X 22 in. Coll. Mr. H, S. Ede,
DAVID JONES 297
no general for us men', he has told us, *has been my sheet anchor in
times of bewilderment-that is at all times'. In so saying he has no
illusions about the contribution that systems of thought can make
to creative art; indeed he is very much alive to the vanity of depend
ing upon them for what they cannot give.
I don't of course mean that any amount of true philosophical or meta
physical definition will aid one whit, necessarily, the painting of a
picture. Because the ability to paint a good picture does not come
through philosophy or religion in any direct manner at all.
Such definitions could only have indeed a damaging effect on the
making of things if thought of as providing some theory to work by ~
a substitute for imagination and direct creativeness; and would so sadly
defeat their own object-which is, to protect the imagination from the
slavery of false theory and to give the perfect law of liberty to our
creativeness. To protect, in fact, what is natural to man.
I would say [he has written] that as affecting the arts in general,
certain ideas implicit or explicit in Catholic Dogma, or anyway, ideas
that come to me personally through the channel of the Catholic
Church, have had a considerably liberating effect. Others, no doubt,
receive them from other channels or discover them for themselves,
perhaps; but for me, I must own my indebtedness to Her alone in this.
Of these ideas the most influential with him is, he tells us, one of
the basic teachings of the Church.
I learned, I think, at least by analogy, from the doctrinal definition of
the substantial Presence in the Sacramental Bread. Thenceforth a tree
in a painting or a tree in an embroidery must not be a 're-presenting'
only of a tree of sap and thrusting wood-it must really be 'a tree' under
the species of paint, or needlework, or whatever. I know this analogy
cannot in any way be pressed and is open to every sort of objection,
but for me it has its uses and it will loosely serve.
An immediate consequence of his coming habitually to consider
his ideas and activities in so wide a context was to diminish his con
fidence in the value of the instruction which an art school could
impart. It was not that he grew critical of his teachers. On the con
trary. Even now, more than thirty years after the conclusion of his
professional education, he speaks of his teachers with lively gratitude,
in particular of Hartrick, with whom he has not worked since 1914.
The principal cause of his dissatisfaction with art schools was that the
disappearance of the apprentice system involved the disappearance
298 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
of a thorough art education based upon the continuity of a living
tradition, and that the academies which supplanted the Guilds taught
a dead tradition or else the idiosyncrasies of the teacher.
One day in 1922 he was taken by a fellow student at Westminster
to visit Eric Gill at Ditchling. On their way back to London this
fellow student remarked that he was relieved to get away from the
shrine of arty-craftiness, to which David Jones answered that he, on
the contrary, intended to return there and work with Gill. Not long
afterwards he joined the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic at
Ditchling. Here he attempted to master the trade of carpentry under
George Maxwell, and the use of the engraver's tools under Father
Desmond Chute and Eric Gill. As a carpenter he was no use, but as
an engraver, though he never reached Gill's precision and finish, he
eventually learnt sufficient to enable him to make prints of unusual
beauty. Here also he carried out, in 1923, a big wall-painting in oils
Cum Floribus et Palmis. This is a conventional essay in the early
Christian style, but it is lacking neither in tenderness nor in dignity.
The impulse which led David Jones to become Gill's apprentice
was a prescient impulse, for what he learnt from Gill exceeded his
utmost expectations. At the particular moment of their meeting
what Eric Gill had to offer was precisely what David Jones stood most
urgently in need of. When he came to Ditchling David Jones was
meditating deeply on many things. He was now a Catholic who only
vaguely apprehended how his faith could transform his life and his
art; he was a student interested in current Parisian theorizing,
particularly in the dogma of 'significant form', who was unable to
place this theorizing in a setting sufficiently wide to enable him to
use it. By his character and his experience Gill was peculiarly fitted
to be his guide.
Of anybody I have ever known Eric Gill made the most deter
mined attempt to 'put his religion', as the saying is, 'into practice'.
This attempt went far beyond the regulation of his personal life
according to the teachings of the Church: it sought to understand
these teachings so clearly as to be able to see their bearing upon every
problem of life, public no less than private, and, having understood,
to act in obedience to them. It must be admitted that his determina
tion to make the teachings of religion, down to the utmost that they
implied, the very basis of life led him into some contradictions,
DAVID JONES 299
absurdities and even uncharities. David Jones was a man deeply, if
as yet vaguely, stirred by the religious spirit. The intimacy of a man
who attempted, with such singleness of purpose, and such courage,
the application of ancient truths to the refractory fabric of actual life,
was of a value to him beyond calculation. At this critical juncture
Gill was able, in particular, to give to David Jones the benefit of his
own lucid thinking about the arts.
In an article 1 on David Jones which appeared eight years after their
first meeting, Eric Gill writes of the temptation to which contem
porary artists were subject of regarding the formal values of painting
-'significant form' according to the current cliche-as alone possess
ing merit, and the subject, even in the widest sense, as an irrelevance.
Such an exclusive insistence on form, [he contends] however useful it
has been as an eye-opener, is as essentially heretical as a too exclusive
insistence upon representative veracity, or upon utility, i.e. die value
of a painting as doing something of service to its owner, for heresy in
artistic thinking, as in other matters, is little more than a running amok
after one statement of the truth to the exclusion of others. To David
Jones [he continues] a painting is neither simply a representation, nor
simply a painted pattern What concerns him is the universal thing
showing through the particular thing, and as a painter it is this
showing through that he endeavours to capture. . . . Nevertheless, in
spite of this idealist attitude he never loses sight of the fact that it is a
painting he is making ... not merely an essay in Platonic research. My
object [he says in conclusion] is ... to make a clear statement of his
point of view.
The point of view expressed in this article is in fact Gill's own.
It agrees, at all points, with that expressed in his other writings and
in his conversation.
During the years of their close association the older man stamped
the impress of his system of ideas upon the younger. Even this short
article, which is far from being even a summary of Gill's thought,
well expresses a number of the ideas of David Jones mentioned in
these pages. The relation, for instance, between the universal and the
particular. But thereisnoneed to insist upon Davidjones's intellectual
indebtedness to Gill, for he himself, always ready in his appreciation
of his teachers, has written that 'the clarifying ideas of Mr GiU were
at that time, and for me, of very great value. The unity of all made
1 'David Jones', 'Artwork', Autumn 1930.
300 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
things became clearer.' The mind of David Jones was too original
to be confined within another man's ideas; it has developed since his
apprenticeship in directions unthought of by his master, but it is
true, I think, to say that it has retained the framework derived from
Gill. It may sound paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that this
framework served David Jones better than it did Gill himself. By
temperament Gill was an extremely tidy man, and the several arts
and crafts he practised all reflected this extreme tidiness and made one
over-conscious of their finish. It was reflected with equal clarity in
his somewhat didactic thinking, and it made for rigidity and some
times for false simplicity. Intellectual issues tended with him to
resolve themselves too simply into blacks and whites. An excess of
tidiness, material and intellectual, had the effect of giving to the man
and his works a self-conscious consistency, in short a touch of small-
ness and pedantry.
Unlike Gill, David Jones is not naturally tidy: his innate tendency
is to be diffuse, vague, delicately expansive. So it is that the same
system of ideas that had a restrictive effect upon the innately over-
tidy Gill provided for David Jones a firm, logical framework which
gave form and direction to an art which, however lovely, wanted
for both.
Towards the end of 1924 when Gill, unable any longer to bear
the publicity which the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic had
attracted, withdrew from Ditchling to Capel-y-ffin, David Jones
returned to London, where he continued to make engravings. The
next year he followed Gill into the Vale of Ewyas, where he made,
in water-colours or chalk, the group of drawings already mentioned
of the hills round about. From Capel-y-fEn he paid two visits of
some months each to the Benedictines of Caldey Island, off the
Pembrokeshire coast, where he made drawings of a similar character
of the sea and boats and the rocky coast, and was allowed the use of
the scriptorium to work in. It was in the Vale of Ewyas and on
Caldey Island that I began to have some idea of what I personally
would ask a painting to be, and I think from 1926 onwards there
has been a fairly recognizable direction in my work.' At this time
he was occupied no less with engraving than with drawing.
In 1927 he left "Wales and returned to Brockley to live with his
parents, staying with them at intervals, too, in a bungalow at
DAVID JONES 301
Portslade near Hove, from the balcony of which he made paintings
of the sea. It was at Portslade that he wrote down a few sentences
that turned out to be the initial sentences of 'In Parenthesis'.
David Jones now entered upon the most prolific period of his life:
'I painted all the time; I never seemed to stop painting in those days.
... It was during this period that I was most able to concentrate on
getting towards what I wanted in painting.' The year of his return
ing home was chiefly occupied with engraving on wood ten illus
trations for 'The Chester Play of the Deluge', 1 of which at least one,
The Dove, will surely take a high place among the finest book
illustrations in an age of finely illustrated books. This engraving
proclaims the value to the artist of the faith he had found, and upon
which he had meditated so deeply. Many illustrators have taken or
been given momentous subjects on account of the pictorial possi
bilities they offer. Here is no exploitation of pictorial possibilities.
For David Jones the compact ark, discovered just before sunrise
riding the vast waste of the sea, and the old black tree, projecting
above the waves, sending forth fresh shoots, all this proclaiming a
world washed clean and a new beginning for mankind, are part of a
truth which he accepts as valid. During 1927 he also found time to
make drawings at the Zoo and occasional drawings from the life.
It was in this year that he joined the Society of "Wood-Engravers
and held, at the St. George's Gallery, 2 his first exhibition, consisting
of water-colours made in Wales and at Brockley and Portslade. The
following year, too, was partly occupied with engraving, on copper,
ten illustrations for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. 3 Whether
because the subject was one which did not belong to his most
intimate spiritual experience or because water-colour rather than
engraving had become his chosen medium, it is evident that the later
series possesses little of the imaginative force of the earlier. Take for
instance no. V (I closed my eyes'): could anything more feebly
interpret the great poem than the boat-load of flimsy nudes, with
archly-glancing almond eyes, posturing improbably? Yet Gill could
write of it that 'Coleridge's poem has for the first time found
adequate pictorial accompaniment/ 4 Were it not so widely admired
* The Golden Cockerell Press, 1927.
2 In Grosvenor Street, not connected with the existing gallery of the same name.
* Published by Douglas Cleverdon, 1929- Loc - Clt
302 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
I would have disregarded this series, considering it as merely one
failure in the most richly creative years of his life. It was towards the
end of the decade that his water-colours assumed their unique
character: they became larger in size, and the slightly naive manner
of their fashioning gave way to the evocative complex of fine,
delicate, unemphatic lines and the fluid, opalescent colours from
which shines out a light recognizable as that rare thing, something
new. This is a time when a high value is set upon originality: indeed
for some critics this quality is the measure of greatness. What is
certain is that it is a quality a good deal rarer than is generally sup
posed. I propose to say nothing at this point about the stature of
David Jones, but I do suggest that these large water-colours are
among the most original creations in modern painting. A sharp eye
and a clear view is needed to distinguish between the paintings of
Picasso and Braque of the Cubist period, or between those of
Matisse, Dufy and Vlaminck, say, of the Fauve period, but nobody
in any circumstances could fail to recognize one of these larger water-
colours by David Jones.
This fluid and diffusive art owes its intelligibility to its context in
a known world order. In spite of the extreme intricacy of the artist's
mind and his reticently zestful tendency towards elaboration, it is a
comparatively straightforward art- an art far removed from sub
jectivity. Unlike most of his contemporaries who manufacture their
own symbols for themselves, David Jones finds his in the public
language and the public symbolism of the Catholic Church. Con
fident as he is in the truth of the Catholic scheme of things, he is
equally confident in the validity of the central Christian signs, for
example, of the sacramental signs of the Eucharist. Being sure, then,
of the absolute validity of this central symbolism, he feels himself
free to use it as a key symbolism with which to explore and illuminate
human dreams and aspirations, as conveyed in ritual, legend and
tradition. In the art of many other contemporaries which seems at
first glance far simpler, it is difficult on scrutiny to make out why,
except in purely sensuous terms, the artist has chosen to make the
particular images he has. Many of David Jones's pictures, on the
other hand, are at first sight extremely difficult to grasp in regard
both to their form and to their meaning; yet on scrutiny there is to
be found nothing arbitrary about the images that make them up.
DAVID JONES 303
The gentle, unemphatic style of his utterance springs from confi
dence in the logic of his symbols.
Much of what he did in the earlier part of this uniquely fruitful
period of his life had little symbolic content. Landscape was what
chiefly occupied him, 'the rambling, familiar, south-walled, small
flower-beddedness of Piggotts' (the house in Buckinghamshire to
which Eric Gill had moved); 'the north, serene clear silverness' of
Rock, the house of Miss Helen Sutherland, a discerning patron, in
Cumberland; back-gardens at Brockley, and the sea seen from
window or veranda in Hove and Brighton- these, together with
animals, flowers, still-life and an occasional portrait, were his
principal subjects. For some obscure reason his rare portraits have
not been rated quite as highly as they deserve. The Eric Gill, 1 - of
1930, is an admirable likeness, and the far more elaborate portrait of
Gill's daughter Petra im Rosenhag? of 1931, shows her just as I
remember her. The least successful of them is Human Being* also
of 1931, a too summary self-portrait in oils, a medium he seldom
uses. In painting landscape he works when possible from a window.
1 like looking out on the world/ he says, 'from a reasonably
sheltered position. I can't paint in the wind, and I like the indoors-
outdoors contained yet limitless feeling of windows and doors.
A man should be in a house; a beast should be in the field, and
all that/
Although less numerous than the landscapes his still-lifes express
no less intimately the complex sensibility of the artist's outlook on
the world. Like the landscapes, the still-lifes are set in a world in a
state of flux, in which one object melts into another, in which, as
Mr. Ironside has written,
the various phenomena embrace one another in a kind of Franciscan
sympathy, and the mind, the heart which creates it does so in a mood
of Franciscan affection. Franciscan is a term to be applied, with
peculiar justice, [the same writer perceptively continues] to the artist s
graceful, nervous drawings of animals, to the deer naturally and also to
the lynxes and the leopards which are presented to us as God's creatures
and not at all as man's possible enemies, and though we see they have
a dark side, it is not the darkness of rapacious instincts, but the porten
tous obscurity of some mythological role. . . . 4
1 Coll the Artist. 2 Coll. Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B.
Coll. Miss Helen Sutherland. 4 Op. cit.
304 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
The appearance, and in profusion, of manifestations of a sensibility
and of an invention so extraordinary led to the growth of a loosely
knit circle of fervent supporters of the artist, and to his work's
coming to the notice of a considerable public. An exhibition of it
was held at the Goupil Gallery, in 1929, consisting largely of water-
colours made in the course of a visit to Salies de Beam and Lourdes
the year before; in 1930 at Heal's Mansard Gallery there was an
exhibition of animal drawings, mostly made at the London Zoo;
and from 1930 until 1933 he exhibited as a member of the Seven and
Five Society. 1 From the Goupil exhibition The Terrace* a water-
colour of 1929, was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society.
This period of happy productivity was brought to a close by the
first of a succession of attacks of illness. Whenever his health has
permitted, he has continued to make drawings, and although since
1933 his output has been sporadic to this later, less propitious period
belong several works in which his rare fusion of imagination and
sensibility has found its fullest expression. I am thinking in particular
of four water-colour drawings: Guenever*o 1940, The Four Queens,*
of 1941 (both illustrations to the Arthurian Legend), Aphrodite
in Aulis, 5 also of 1941 (Plate 29), and Vexilla Regis* of 1947
(Plate 30).
In two important respects these differ from the artist's earlier
drawings. With certain exceptions -such, for instance, as Merlin
appears in the form of a young child to Arthur sleeping? of i93O~David
Jones has looked at the now and the near under the inspiration of
'an affection for the intimate creatureliness of things ... an apprecia
tion of the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals'. In certain
of his drawings we are made only vaguely aware of his preoccupa
tion with history and legend, which is explicit, however, only in the
title. A water-colour and gouache of the south of France, of 1928, is
entitled The Roman Land, 8 and a small chapel in a landscape, of 1932,
The Chapel Perilous. 9 The four later water-colour drawings are the
fruits of the perceptions of his inner eye, and their subjects are
explicitly legendary. And although the floating forms, as they merge
1 See note at end of chapter. 2 The Tate Gallery, London.
3 The Tate Gallery, London. * T h e x a te Gallery, London.
6 Private Collection. e QJL Mn H E( j e _
7 Coll. Mr. Michael Richey. 8 The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
9 CoU. Miss Helen Sutherland.
DAVID JONES 305
one into the other in the diaphanous mesh of lines, have an opalescent
radiance, the lines themselves play a more crucial part than they do
in most of the earlier drawings. English Window, 1 of 1931, with its
magical evocation of English domestic life, would be almost without
meaning in a black and white reproduction, whereas the last four
lose much of their beauty but little of their sense. The visitor to the
exhibitions of the works of contemporaries may sometimes wonder
how most of the pictures ever came to be painted: the impulse behind
them is so feeble and their meaning so little worthy of being im
parted. Those endless stone outbuildings set in Yorkshire Dales,
those endless daffodils standing forlornly in hand-thrown pots from
an artshop, or, for that matter, an arrangement of squares and circles
of raw and sticky paint, envisaged with a languid regard and not
uncommonly with positive boredom: how did it come about that
anyone thought it worth while to give permanent form to some
thing that interested him so little? It may be that David Jones made
these four drawings when he was troubled about his health, and un
certain how long a period of immunity from affliction could be
counted on. I do not know; but what is certain is that he made them
as though each represented a last opportunity to make a picture: so
instinct are they with experience long pondered, with knowledge of
history and legend and of the Catholic liturgy lovingly stored up,
besides an undiminished affection for 'the intimate creatureliness of
things'.
David Jones's great drawings, unlike most of the pictures in
exhibitions of contemporary painting, are, if anything, too rich in
content and meaning. They express, and in profuse detail, the
religious ponderings of a man for whom, as I noted earlier, the
doctrines of Christianity are true and are keys with which other
doors may be unlocked; their symbols are paradigms of which legend
and the symbolism of other rites are seen as precursors or approxi
mations. For David Jones the incarnation, passion, death and resur
rection of Christ are unique historical events, and Christianity is not
a continuation of nature-religions; but like some (though not, of
course, all) of the early Christian Fathers, David Jones sees Christi
anity as the fulfilment of the earlier dreams, the reality of which they
were intimations. It is only another way of putting this to say that
1 Coll. Mr. A. H. Wheen.
306 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
for him Christianity gives the clue to what legend and myth really
were about.
So, for example, Aphrodite in Aulis is clearly Aphrodite. Like the
Venus of Lucretius 'De Rerum Natura 5 she is not only hominum
divomque voluptas but the fosterer of all nature's abundance and
activity and turmoil. Soldiers are all about her, and columns and
entablatures are broken. But she is also Iphigeneia, shackled by the
ankle, a sacrificial victim and voluntary oblation standing on an
altar. The altar is an ornate classical pedestal on which is inscribed a
ram, whose blood pours into a cup set beneath it. Hand and foot of
this victim are pierced, and the British soldier to the left carries a
lance; on the right a monk in religious habit swings a thurible of
incense. A monk in such a posture is appropriate if, but only if, the
symbolism is eucharistic. For David Jones it is the Eucharist that
redeems the historical process; accordingly, around Aphrodite are
ranged soldiers of those times and places that interest him most,
Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Arthurian, British, German; columns and
pediments are broken, but around this sign all the orders of archi
tecture retain their validity. Around her neck Aphrodite wears a
necklace that carries a cross, and indeed there are stars in her hair
with a crescent moon above, as if she were after all the Madonna
and the Mother of all the Living (as in Hopkins's 'May Magnificat'),
while around her head fly doves, the effulgence of one of which
radiates her body. In the eucharistic sign, then, is she seen for what
after all she is-even if in aspect she be Phryne or Lesbia.
The same sweep throughout time and the same confidence that
the dreams and aspirations and stories and achievements of human
kind are to be understood for what they are in the light of the Mass
and the Redemption is apparent in the much simpler and deeply
moving Vexilla Regis. The title of this drawing is taken from the
Easter hymn, Vexilla regis prodeunt,fulget cruds mysterium. But in the
drawing there are no royal standards, and there is no cross. Indeed
the only Christian emblems are some of the instruments of the passion
and a pelican and doves. But for David Jones the 'mystery of the
Cross' is everywhere, in the wolf-helmet of the Roman augur, in
the nude goddess on the fountain, in the Doric temple and the pillar
surmounted by the Roman eagle, in Stonehenge, all set in a wooded
landscape whose atmosphere, like its animals, is Arthurian.
DAVID JONES
If in what pertains to the content of his art he is one of the most
'traditional' artists alive, his drawing in the manner of its presenta
tion stands somewhat aside from the great tradition. Berenson has
defined, in words of high authority, the essential in the art of paint
ing as the power 'to stimulate our consciousness of tactile values, so
that the picture shall have at least as much power as the object
represented to appeal to our tactile imagination'.
David Jones makes no attempt to appeal to our tactile imagination;
he rouses our tactile sense only so far as is necessary to assure us that
his symbols are in fact solid and not merely hieroglyphics worked
upon a veil. The figure of Aphrodite is shown, by delicate modelling
here and there, to be a figure very much of flesh and blood. But if
his forms are often floating wraiths, those who have the patience to
decipher the intricate tracery of his lines will discover that his art
does not ignore the third dimension: that if the spectator has only
occasionally the illusion of being able to touch the objects which
David Jones represents, he will have the illusion of wandering among
them, penetrating so far behind what at first resembles a veil as to
lose himself in a diversely populated Lyonesse.
Even for those who have had the privilege of knowing him
for many years and have an innate delight in his drawing and
his writing, patience is necessary still. But patience is invariably
rewarded.
In July 1954 David Jones remarked that I had never visited him at
his home in Harrow. I arrived at the house to which he had directed
me-a large Victorian boarding-house. No one answering the loud-
clanging bell, I went in. A kettle was boiling on the range in the
empty kitchen downstairs, but there was nobody there. Floor by
floor, room by room I searched the silent house. Upon the over
mantel in the dining-room (wherein was a long table set with many
places) stood a photograph of a David Jones inscription, evidence
that I had come at any rate to the right house. I knocked, knocked
again, and, no answer being returned, I looked into one room after
another, every one untenanted. Brooding on this Kafka-like predica
ment, I mounted laboriously from floor to floor, hearing no sound
but the wind in the corridors. At last, on an upper floor my- knock
was answered. The door opened and there was my elusive host,
welcoming and reassuring, in his cosy bed-sitting room, with a warm
308 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
fire and a kettle singing upon it. The narrow bed stood near the
window, which gave upon a hortus inclusus, and, more distantly,
upon a distant prospect of London, and upon the bed was a drawing
board and tacked to it a work just begun. At the time a big exhibition
of his work was touring Wales, yet some of his best drawings were
hanging on his own walls. I twitted him upon his liking for keeping
his work beside him, and added that I had long wanted to buy one
of his pictures but because of this preference had refrained from
trying to do so. 'Don't for a moment think that I haven't appreciated
that,' he answered. With the tea and toast he prepared we sat down
beside the fire. He had no real knowledge, he told me, of Latin, only
what he had picked up from inscriptions and the Liturgy. He also
told me that he never worked from studies, but either directly from
nature or from imagination; but mostly we talked of our early
meetings and of our friendship with Eric Gill. How little changed he
was, I thought, since the day when I had first seen him, a young
apprentice twenty-eight years before, at Eric Gill's house at Capel-
y-ffin in the room darkened by the swirling mist outside. Except as a
soldier in France he had led a cloistered life since. His love for Latin,
a language he does not know and yet has an innate feeling for, and
for Welsh, a language of which his knowledge is smaller still, has
given him a singular power of conveying in his own writing their
especial beauties. In the same way, from a loving apprehension of
things still deeper than language, he has been able, and in the face of
persistant ill-health, to reveal, in picture after picture, the Christian
fulfilment of myths and images that have immemorially haunted
the mind of man.
Note. Although the Seven and Five Society belongs to recent history and
numbers among its members artists of contemporary fame, information
about it is not easy to come by; its own records appear to be incomplete
and no full set of its exhibition catalogues seems to be available. It may
be useful, therefore, to append a note about it before it disappears entirely
from memory.
The Seven and Five Society (the name signified seven painters and five
sculptors) was formed in 1919 and held its last and fourteenth exhibition
of work by members and others in 1935 or 1936. It is now defunct but
has never been formally disbanded. It had a curious and unsuccessful
beginning/ wrote Mr. Robin Ironside, 'as an endeavour to co-ordinate
any discoverable artistic tendencies that might plant the seeds in this
DAVID JONES 309
country of Expressionism as it had developed on the continent.' 1 This is
possibly too precise a formulation of its aims; but the Society did indeed
have as its initial inspiration a conscious reaction from aesthetic views such
as those promulgated by Roger Fry and a conscious interest in subject-
matter. In the 'thirties, however, largely owing, it would appear, to the
energy and influence of Ben Nicholson, a very active member, the Society
changed direction in favour of non-representational art.
The rules of the Society allowed for new members and these were
elected at every meeting. The list of its members is a remarkable one; it
included Ivon Hitchens and P. J. Jowett (both very early members), Ben
Nicholson (elected in 1924 or 1925), Evie Hone, Christopher Wood
(elected in 1926), Winifred Nicholson, David Jones (elected in 1928),
Barbara Hepworth, Frances Hodgkins (elected in 1929, resigned in 1934
-apparently on a disagreement with policy about non-representational
art), John Aldridge, Henry Moore, John Piper, Edward Bawden.
Early exhibitions of the Society were held at the now defunct Gieves
Gallery and Paterson's Galleries in Old Bond Street and at Walker's
Galleries in New Bond Street; at least one was held at the Beaux-Arts
Gallery and one at Messrs. Arthur Tooth and Sons; in the early 'thirties
the Society exhibited regularly at the Leicester Galleries, and the last
exhibition of all took place at the Zwemmer Gallery.
1 'Painting since 1939', published for the British Council, 1947.
HENRY MOORE
b. 1898
UNTIL Moore was nearly forty his drawings were regarded
as the marginal activity of a sculptor. As an ever growing
number of people believed him to be a great sculptor, his
drawings compelled interest and respect. Quite apart from their
intimate connexion with his sculpture they merited interest and
respect as expressions of a mind of unusual originality and power.
But had Moore not been a sculptor but a draughtsman only, and had
he died before the Second World War, I think it doubtful whether
his drawings would have taken an important place in the art of the
century. Exhibitions were held respectively at the Zwemmer and
Mayor Galleries in 1935 and 1939, In the bibliography appended to
the principal work on the artist hitherto published 1 I can find no
piece of writing dealing with the drawings separately from the
sculpture prior to 1940. There were, of course, numerous notices of
the drawings in association with the sculpture, and numerous
references to them in articles of more general scope, of which the
first appeared in 193 3, 2 when Moore was already thirty-five. He
himself wrote in 1937, 'My drawings are done mainly as a help
towards making sculpture-as a means of generating ideas for
sculpture, tapping oneself for the initial idea, and as a way of sorting
out ideas and developing them. And I sometimes,' he concedes,
'draw just for enjoyment/ 3 I shall refer later to this illuminating
article; for the present I wish merely to suggest that in 1937 Moore
regarded his drawing as mainly ancillary to his sculpture. Three years
later, in the shelters in which Londoners sought respite from German
bombs, he underwent experiences that made him a draughtsman of
comparable stature to the sculptor.
o- o o
1 'Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings', with an Introduction by Herbert
Read, 3rd edition, 1949.
2 'On Sculptors' Drawings and Henry Moore in particular' in 'Black on White',
by Arnold L. Haskell, 1933.
3 'Notes on Sculpture', 'The Listener', 18 August 1937.
310
HENRY MOORE 311
Henry Spencer Moore was born on 30 July 1898 at Castleford,
Yorkshire, the seventh child of Raymond Spencer Moore and his
wife Mary, born Baker. The elder Moore was an aspiring and
industrious man.
He had begun as a farmer, doing whatever a boy of nine does in be
coming a farmer- scaring crows, I suppose, [Henry Moore rektes] but
had later turned to coal mining. He educated himself: knew the whole
of Shakespeare, taught himself engineering to the point where he passed
examinations qualifying him to become manager of the mine where he
worked. His eyes, however, through an accident down the mine, grew
bad enough to interfere with his further advancement. 1
Moore's paternal great-grandfather came from Ireland, but his father
and grandfather were born in Lincolnshire, and for several genera
tions the men on both sides of his family had worked on the land or
below it as miners.
At the age of twelve Moore won a scholarship from the elementary-
school to Castleford Grammar School, but
I had always wanted to be a sculptor, [Moore has told us] at least since
I was about ten. However, my first art teacher at Castleford upset me
a great deal; she said I drew figures with feet like tassels! I recall exacdy
what she referred to: figures with feet in the air, like early Gothic
drawings -suspended in the air. . . . 2
His father strongly opposed Moore's becoming an artist; instead he
wished him to follow an elder brother and a sister to York Training
College and to become a teacher. The lady who had objected to the
feet of his drawn figures was replaced by Miss Alice Gostick, who
became a firm ally in the argument with his father, which persisted
from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year. Parental authority pre
vailed and by September 1916 he was a teacher at his old elementary
school. From this false start he was delivered by the First World
War. In February 1917 he joined the Army, serving as a private in
the 1 5th London Regiment (Civil Service Rifles). He went to France
in the early summer, and in November was gassed in the battle of
Cambrai, and invalided home. On his recovery, after a course at
Aldershot, he was made a corporal and a bayonet instructor. Two
* Henry Moore', an interview with James Johnson Sweeney. Partisan Review',
March-April 1947, with some later qualifications of Moore himself made to the
present writer.
2 Ibid.
312 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
years of war had weakened parental authority, and with the help of
his friend Miss Gostick he applied for an ex-Serviceman's grant to
the Leeds School of Art.
The rigidly academic teaching was little to his purpose, but he
won a Royal Exhibition to the Royal College of Art, His two years
in Leeds were not wasted years. Visits to nearby Adel, where there
are early examples of Romanesque carving, 'opened up,' he said,
*the whole affair for me'. 1 The interest in early sculpture which this
aroused was heightened by coming upon Fry's 'Vision and Design*
in the Reference Library, from which he first learned of Mexican
and Negro sculpture, and which led him to other books on ancient
art. His outlook was further broadened by access to the collection of
Sir Michael Sadler, Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1911
until 1923, which contained paintings by Gauguin and Van Gogh,
as well as by many English independent painters.
In the illuminating interview already quoted Moore gave an
account of the struggle which followed his arrival in London.
For the first three months [he said] I was in a daze of excitement. One
room after another in the British Museum took my enthusiasm. The
Royal College of Art meant nothing in comparison . . . everything was
wonderful- a new world at every turn . . . after the first excitement it
was the art of ancient Mexico that spoke to me most- except perhaps
Romanesque. . . . And I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican
art formed my views of carving. . . .
But my aims as a 'student' were directly at odds with my taste in
sculpture. Already, even here a conflict had set in. And for a considerable
while after my discovery of the archaic sculpture in the British Museum
there was a bitter struggle within me, on the one hand, between the
need to follow my course at college in order to get a teacher's diploma
and, on the other, the desire to work freely at what appealed most to
me in sculpture. At one point I was seriously considering giving up
college and working only in the direction that attracted me. But, tank
goodness, I somehow came to the realization that academic discipline
is valuable. And my need to have a diploma, in order to earn a living,
helped.
I now understand the value of an academic grounding: modelling and
drawing from life. All sculptors of the great periods of European art
could draw from life, just as well as the painters. With me, at one
moment, it was just touch and go. But finally I hit on a sort of com
promise arrangement: academic work during the semester, and (luring
1 Sweeney, loc. cit
HENRY MOORE 313
the holidays a free rein to the interests I had developed in the British
Museum. Mixing the two things enabled one to continue drawing from
life as I have always done. And it also allowed me to win my travelling
scholarship to Italy on academic grounds.
My father, who was appointed Principal of the Royal College of
Art only the year before Moore's arrival, recognized his outstanding
talent, describing him in his memoirs as 'the most intelligent and
gifted among the sculptors', 1 and shortly after the Professor of
Sculpture, Derwent Wood, retired in 1924 my father entrusted
Moore with the temporary charge of the Sculpture School, and the
following year appointed him Assistant to Ernest Cole, the new
Professor, a post which he held until 1931, teaching regularly for
two days a week. Moore told me that he used to enjoy drawing
with my father, who in 1931 bought one of his drawings in pen and
ink-a massive seated woman- which hung in the hall of our house.
It must have been soon after he came to London that I became
acquainted with him, because I met him before becoming aware that
he was a sculptor, at one or more of the Sunday evenings when my
parents welcomed students to our house. After such an evening,
when Moore had been present, I asked who he was, and my younger
sister, who was also a student in the School of Sculpture, answered
'He's going to be a great sculptor/
In the thirty-three years or so since then Henry Moore seems to
me to have changed little.
He had the same unassertive assurance, the same kindliness, and the
same intense seriousness of purpose half masked by a benevolent
sociability and the same never ruffled serenity. In one respect he was
different. Only two years before he had been a bayonet instructor
threatened by the prospect of having to resume his post as a teacher
in an elementary school. The revelation of Mexican and Romanesque
and Negro art was very recent: indeed it was in progress; recent,
too, was its interpretation in 'Vision and Design'. His philosophy of
art was actually being forged, and in consequence his convictions
were more rigid than they have since become. In those days his
insistence upon 'truth to material', upon, for instance, the error of
representing flesh which is soft in terms of stone which is hard,
seemed to me a little doctrinaire; so, too, his inclination to discount
1 'Since Fifty: Men and Memories, 1922-1938*, 193 9, p- ^3<5.
314 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
the Hellenic element in European art. But I am writing of the time
before 1924, when he won a Travelling Scholarship that enabled
him to visit Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice and Ravenna. So
strongly were Classical and Renaissance art identified in his mind
with academism and the mechanical copying of plaster casts that,
when the scholarship was awarded to him, he at once pleaded to be
allowed to use it for Paris instead of Italy, but no such arrangement
was possible. *I had to go to Italy against my will,' he said, 'but thank
goodness now I did go.' 1
The following letter which he wrote to my father from via
Fiesolana, 40, Florence, dated 12 March 1924, gives some account of
his journey and of his response to the works of art he saw.
I have until now been moving with the speed of an American tourist -
the first week of being out-spent in Paris -has sunk into the very
distant past, but the Guimet Museum (the Indian sculptures in the
entrance hall, and the room on the ground fioor-and the sculptures and
paintings from [indecipherable 2 ]) stands out like- like cypress trees in an
Italian landscape-Paris itself I did not like- and after the Louvre and
the Guimet Museum the few exhibitions of contemporary work which
I saw seemed almost rubbish.
I've made stops at Genoa, Pisa and Rome, before coming on here to
Florence. In Italy the early wall paintings -the work of Giotto, Orcagna,
Lorenzetti, Taddeo Gaddi, the paintings leading up and including
Massacio's are what have so far interested me most. Of great sculpture
f ve seen very little- Giotto's painting is the finest sculpture I met in
Italy-what I know of Indian, Egyptian and Mexican, sculpture com
pletely overshadows Renaissance sculpture- except for the early Italian
portrait busts, the very late work of Michael Angelo and the work of
Donatello- though in the influence of Donatello I think I see the
beginning of the end-Donatello was a modeller, and it seems to me
that it is modelling that has sapped the manhood out of Western sculp
ture, but the two main reasons are, don't you think, the widespread
avoidance of thinking and working in stone- and the wilful throwing
away of the Gothic tradition-in favour of a pseudo Greek-I believe
that even mediocre students at college or anywhere, had they been
lucky enough to have entered a sculptor's workshop, later would most
probably nave been doing work which we should now admire-in
Italy of the I4th century, in one small town of 20 or 30 thousand
inhabitants there must have been living and working at the same time
50 or 60 painters each of whom were he doing his same work now
would be accounted a genius! . . . The only hope I can see for a school
1 Sweeney, loc. cit. 2 Moore thinks he was referring to Etruscan art.
HENRY MOORE 315
of sculpture in England, under our present system, is a good artist
working carving in the big tradition of sculpture, who can get the
sympathy and admiration of students, and propagate good as Dalou
and Lanteri spread harm.
I have been seeing rather than doing until now- and I think I have
seen examples of most of the Italians -Giotto has made the greatest im
pression upon me (perhaps partly because he's the most English of the
primitives). My present plans are, the Giottos at Assisi, and at Padua,
then out of Italy via Ravenna and Venice and on to Munich-from
Germany home via Paris so that I can finish up at the Guimet Museum.
I am beginning to get Engknd into perspective-I think I shall return
a violent patriot. If this scholarship does nothing else for me-it will
have made me realise what treasures we have in England-what a
paradise the British Museum is, and how high in quality, representative,
how choice is our National Collection- and how inspiring is our
English landscape. I do not wonder that the Italians have no landscape
school-I have a great desire-almost an ache for the sight of a tree that
can be called a tree-for a tree with a trunk.
Yours sincerely,
Henry Moore.
In all his travels the place which made the deepest and most lasting
impression upon him was the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del
Carmine in Florence. Here Moore came every morning before doing
anything else to study the splendid figures painted on its walls by
Masaccio. Thither Michelangelo and Raphael had gone before him,
and Vasari had written that 'all the most celebrated sculptors and
painters since Masaccio's day have become excellent and illustrious
by studying their art in this chapel'. The name of none of the masters
is so often on Moore's lips as Masaccio's.
The immediate effect of his Italian journey was not illumination
but tension which he was scarcely able to bear. 'For about six months
after my return I was never more miserable in my life/ he said. 'Six
months exposure to the masterworks of European art had stirred up
a violent conflict with my previous ideals. I couldn't seem to shake off
the new impressions, or make use of them without denying all I had
devoutly believed in before. I found myself helpless and unable to
work. Then gradually I began to find my way out of my quandary
in the direction of my earlier interests. I came back to ancient
Mexican art in the British Museum. I came across an illustration of the
"Chacmool",discovere<latChichenItzainaGermanpubhcation-and
316 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
its curious reclining posture attracted me-not lying on its side, but
on its back with its head twisted around. Still the effects of that trip
never really faded.' 1 They did not fade; but neither did they show
themselves fully until years afterwards: when they did show them
selves they added an element to the art of Moore which made him a
great draughtsman.
On his return to London, then, he went back more assiduously
than ever to his study of ancient art at the British Museum, especially
Mexican art. It was then, too, that he came upon the reproduction of
'Chacmool', the celebrated Toltec-Maya carving in limestone of
the reclining figure of the Rain Spirit, which has haunted his
imagination. Its effect upon several of his stone carvings -such for
instance as Reclining Figure* of I929~is very marked. His untiring
research at the British Museum, in Italy, and later on in Greece and
Mexico, has made him one of the best educated of sculptors: few
scholars-apart from those responsible for the collections -can have
so wide a knowledge as he of the sculpture in the British Museum,
and his knowledge of European sculpture since the advent of Rodin
is no less extensive. The quality of his knowledge is even more
impressive than its extent. Moore, who was in Italy in 1948 at the
time of a special exhibition of his work at the Venice Biennale, called
on Mr. Berenson in Florence. A few days afterwards I took Mr.
Berenson round the exhibition of Moore's sculpture in the British
Pavilion.
The two most destructive personalities in European art today [he said]
are Picasso and Moore: Picasso consciously destructive, and Moore
unconsciously. How strange that it should be so -about Moore I mean,
for I've never had a visitor who showed such knowledge and perception
about my sculpture-not a piece of which he had ever seen before.
Moore's search for the basic forms and rhythms of nature took
him not only to the British Museum, but also and often to the
Museum of Natural History, and he has always delighted in the
assiduous study of natural forms, bones, shells, pebbles and the like.
(On my most recent visit I saw him from a distance bending over,
head in the 'boot* of his car, and when I approached I found that he
was unpacking a haul of stones worked by the sea, collected on the
holiday from which he had just returned.)
1 Sweeney, loc. cit. 2 The City Art Gallery, Leeds.
n
Y
! D
13!
HENRY MOORE 317
The guiding ideas which were forming in his mind during the
'twenties and which have remained the basis of his art are lucidly
outlined by the artist himself in several deeply pondered articles. 1
Here, and throughout this study, I shall quote extensively from
Henry Moore's own writings and statements about his art. It is not
rare for artists to write well, but it is rare for contemporary artists to
write accurately about their own work. But not only is Henry
Moore free from the slightest suspicion of aggrandizing himself and
the things that he makes or of inflating their creation into some very
privileged exercise of visionary or even mystical power, and not
only does he consistently use words in readily ascertainable senses,
so that his meaning is always plain, but he is direct and strong as well
as lucid. It is true that once or twice in the past he has picked up
nonsense from the ambient air, as when he spoke of 'the literary idea
that it (an egg) will become a bird/ 2 but such occasions are rare. The
expression of a mind thoroughly genuine and robust, his writing is
also full of the most incisive common sense, of which his paper on
'The Sculptor in Modern Society' is a good instance. 3 Being, then,
so thoroughly informative, I shall have no scruple in using his own
writings freely.
I cannot, I think, do better than quote a few key passages from
'The Sculptor's Aims',
One of Moore's insistent ideas, that of truth to material, I have
already mentioned.
Every material [he wrote] has its own individual qualities. It is only
when the sculptor works direct, when there is an active relationship
with his material, that the material can take its part in the shaping of an
idea. Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be
falsified to look like soft flesh-it should not be forced beyond its con
structive build to a point of weakness. It should keep its hard tense
stoniness. 4
1 Of these the chief are 'The Sculptor's Aims', 'Unit One', edited by Herbert
Read, 1934, p. 128; 'Notes on Sculpture , 'The Listener', 18 August 1937, reprinted
in 'The Painter's Object', edited by Myfanwy Evans, 1937, pp. 21-9, and ^'Art in
England', edited by R. S. Lambert, 1938, pp. 93-9, and 'Primitive Art', 'The
Listener', 24 April 1941. All three are reprinted in 'Henry Moore, Sculpture and
Drawings'.
2 In 'Notes on Sculpture'.
8 A statement made to UNESCO and reprinted in 'Art News , November 1952.
4 'Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings', p. xxxix.
3l8 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Of greater moment, however, for my purpose, is the expression
of his ideal of full three-dimensional realization.
Complete sculptural expression is form in its full spatial reality.
Only to make relief shapes on the surface of the block is to forego
the full power of expression of sculpture. When the sculptor under
stands his material, has a knowledge of its possibilities and its con
structive build, it is possible to keep within its limitations and yet turn
an inert block into a composition which has a full form-existence, with
masses of varied size and section conceived in their air-surrounded
entirety, stressing and straining, thrusting and opposing each other in
spatial relationship -being static, in the sense that the centre of gravity
lies within the base (and does not seem to be falling over or moving
off its base) -and yet having an alert dynamic tension between its parts. 1
Closely connected with this ideal is Moore's predilection for
asymmetry.
Sculpture fully in the round has no two points of view alike. The desire
for form completely realized is connected with asymmetry. For a
symmetrical mass being the same from both sides cannot have more than
half the number of different points of view possessed by a non-sym
metrical mass.
Asymmetry is connected also with the desire for the organic (which
I have) rather than the geometric.
Organic forms, though they may be symmetrical in their main
disposition, in their reaction to environment, growth and gravity, lose
their perfect symmetry.
On Moore's collection and observation of natural objects such as
pebbles I have already commented.
The observation of nature [he writes] is part of an artist's life, it en
larges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by
formula, and feeds inspiration.
The human figure is what interests me most deeply, but I have found
principles of form and rhythm from the study of natural objects such as
pebbles, rocks, bones, trees, plants, etc. 2
Abstract qualities of design [he continues] are essential to the
value of a work, but to me of equal importance is the psychological,
human element. If both abstract and human elements are welded
together in a work, it must have a fuller, deeper meaning. 3
Finally there is Moore's life-long aversion from every kind of
mannerism, every form of art in which primitive vitality and
1 'Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings/ p, xxxix. 2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., pp. xxxix-xl.
HENRY MOORE 319
simplicity, characteristics of an immediate and direct response to life,
are 'smothered in trimmings and surface decorations', enfeebled and
extinguished by 'technical tricks and intellectual conceits', by
academism.
For me [he wrote, therefore] a work must first have vitality of its own.
I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement, physical
action, frisking, dancing figures and so on, but that a work can have
in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the
object it may represent. When work has this powerful vitality we do
not connect the word beauty with it.
Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim in my
sculpture.
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a
difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second
has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper
than the senses. 1
Henry Moore has always drawn. 'Drawing keeps one fit,' he said
to Sir Herbert Read, 'like physical' exercises-perhaps acts like water
to a plant-and it lessens the danger of repeating oneself and
getting into a formula. It enlarges one's form repertoire, one's form
experience.' 2
Although he regarded his earlier drawings 'mainly as a help
towards making sculpture 5 , they early enjoyed a validity in their
own right. The earliest known to me, the series representing monu
mental female figures, generally seated, begun in the middle 'twen
ties and discontinued about ten years later, are drawings of unusual
quality. They are broad in form, serenely aloof in spirit and more
personal than some of his admirers seem to allow. Sir Herbert Read,
for instance, describes them as if made 'before venturing to express
himself in a wholly personal idiom', 3 and he is at considerable pains
to suggest that 'it would be a mistake to give the impression that the
artist began with a relatively academic style', 4 and he points to earlier
and contemporary sculpture of a less academic kind.
As drawings avowedly done from the life they have, naturally
enough, something traditional in their character, but even so they
are far more personal than the Mexican, African and Egyptian
influenced carvings to which Sir Herbert refers. I suggest a simple
Hbid.,p.xi. 2 Ibid.,pp.xxi-xxu.
3 Ibid., p. xxvi. 4 Ibid.
320 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
test. Were Mask, 1 of 1924 (one of the works cited), placed with others
in a collection of ancient Mexican sculpture, it would take an
experienced scholar to pick it out as a modern derivation. Who, on
the other hand, who had ever seen one of the early drawings of
seated women, could fail to attribute it in any company? Some of
the very earliest even, such as Drawing (from life),* of 1928, show, in
rudimentary form, one of the most personal and permanent charac
teristics of Moore's drawing, the two-way section, lines, that is to
say, indicating the section across the form and along it. (This
characteristic is, so to speak, a diagrammatic analysis of form. In
contrast to the rendering and definition of form by light and shade,
it is an analysis of form by lines that exactly define the shape as it
would be in the round, in a longitudinal and a transverse section,
For this sculptural and analytical statement Moore has shown an
increasing preference over the illusion of chiaroscuro. An example
will be found reproduced in Plate 32.) The most obvious target for
criticism offered by the drawing I have cited is not its traditional
character, but is the intrusion of the borrowed double-focus head.
The fact is that Moore, for all his great and manifold natural talents,
and for all his formidable industry, grew slowly to full maturity,
and much of his early work is closely derived from his favoured
models, and some of it marked by a modish chic. And what could
be less surprising? Moore did not attain to his deep insights and wide
knowledge of sculpture by note-taking, by the way of a scholar that
is to say, but by the way of a sculptor actually working in wood and
metal and stone.
If his growth to maturity as a sculptor was slow, as a draughts
man it was slower still.
Moore draws from a variety of intentions. As already noted, he
draws as an aid to sculpture, either 'as a means of generating ideas',
or of 'tapping oneself for the initial idea; and as a way of sorting out
ideas and developing them'. 3 Sculpture is too laborious a process to
allow of his realizing more than a small fraction of the ideas which
form in his mind in prodigious number; drawing is quick and easy
and he finds it a pleasurable way of relieving the imaginative
pressure. Sometimes he draws simply because he enjoys it, but before
1 Coll. Mr. John Gould Fletcher. 2 Coll. Mrs. Irina Moore.
8 'Notes on Sculpture', op. cit., p. xii.
HENRY MOORE 321
long the lines he makes provide the nexus of an idea. And finally he
draws as a means of study and observation of natural forms. Drawing
of this kind is an essential element in his art, because, as he told
Sir Herbert Read, 'in my sculpture I do not draw directly upon the
memory or observations of a particular object, but rather use what
ever comes up from my general fund of knowledge'. 1 The creation
of this fund of knowledge is so vital that, as he told the same friend,
'every few months I stop carving for two or three weeks and do life
drawing'. 2
In the late 'thirties he became aware of an error in his method of
making drawings for sculpture.
I tried to give them as much the illusion of real sculpture as I could [he
wrote] -that is, I drew by the method of illusion, of light falling on a
solid object. But I now find that carrying it so far that it becomes a
substitute for sculpture either weakens the desire to do the sculpture,
or is likely to make the sculpture only a dead realization of the
drawing. 3
He therefore more often drew in line and flat tone, but the vision
behind the drawing was still a three-dimensional vision. The sculp
tor's meaning is clear when we compare sharply-modelled drawings,
all entitled Ideas for Sculpture* made in 1938 (Plates 140, I42A, I42B
and I43A in 'Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings'), with two
drawings of the same year in which solidity is subtly suggested, Ideas
for metd sculpture* and Drawing for Sculpture* (Plates I46A and 1460
in the same book).
During the 'twenties and 'thirties he made drawings of many
kinds, some of them of marked originality, and very few that do not
afford some intimation of a mind of singular and increasing power.
But war brought with it, in an improbable fashion, a transform
ing experience. Until the time of Dunkirk, Moore, living in Kent,
continued to work much as usual, but with invasion threatening he
wished to help directly and returning to London he applied at the
Chelsea Polytechnic for training in the making of precision tools.
But the classes in this subject were few and the applicants many.
Reluctant to begin sculpture that he might be prevented from
i Ibid., p. xxii. 2 Ibid.,p.xxi.
* 'Notes on Sculpture , ibid., p, xliL * Private Collections.
6 Coll Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B. 6 The Bucholz Gallery, New York.
322 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
completing, he spent his time drawing. Months went by without
a word from the Chelsea Polytechnic, and he went on drawing.
Then the air-raids began [I quote yet again from his interview with
Mr. Sweeney] and the, war from being an awful worry became a real
experience. Quite against what I expected I found myself strangely
excited by the bombed buildings, but more still by the unbelievable
scenes and life of the underground shelters. I began filling a notebook
with drawings-ideas based on London's shelter life. Naturally I could
not draw in the shelter itself. I drew from memory on my return home.
But the scenes of the shelter world, static figures (asleep) -'reclining
figures' -remained vivid in my mind, I felt somehow drawn to it all.
Here was something I couldn't help doing.
The effect of his experience in the shelters was to bring a humanity
into Moore's art, above all into his drawing, that it had lacked. I have
given above, in summary form, some account of the ideas which
underlie his art, and in doing so I have used so far as I could his own
formulations of them. But nearly everything he said or wrote about
it was concerned with three-dimentional realization, spacial com
pleteness and the like. And not unnaturally, for most artists delight
in discussing means, but about the ends which these are intended
to serve they are apt to be silent, lest by a process of substitution dis
cussion should lessen their drive to attain them. Moore has never
been an abstract artist, and has rarely confused ends and means. He
is a man deeply conscious of human values.
It might seem from what I have said of shape and form that I regard
them as ends in themselves. Far from it. I am very much aware that
associational, psychological factors play a large part in sculpture. ... I
think the humanist element will always be for me of fundamental
importance in sculpture, giving sculpture its vitality. 1
The nights among the 'unbelievable scenes' of the shelter world and
the days in the shelters observing the empty spaces in which the
nights' dramas were enacted stirred his humanism to a new and
grander consciousness. For the expression of the humanistic values
the European tradition provides a natural language. Its appropriate
ness for the expression of the emotions stirred in him by the shelter
world became suddenly apparent to Moore. Memories of his Italian
1 'Notes on Sculpture', op. cit, p. xlii.
HENRY MOORE 32 ,
journey leaped into life. The Frescoes in the Carmine had a new
relevance for his art.
It was not until the Blitz in London [he told Mr. Sweeney] that I began
to realize how deep-rooted the Italian influence had been Here
curiously enough, is where, in looking back, my Italian trip [he said]
and the Mediterranean tradition came once more to the surface There
was no discarding [he added] of those other interests in archaic art and
the art of primitive peoples, but rather a clearer tension between this
approach and the humanist emphasis. 1
It is precisely this tension between those elements in him which
respond to the art of primitive peoples and those which respond to
the painting of Masaccio which enhanced all his qualities both as
sculptor and draughtsman. In the shelter drawings he created a world
peopled by figures at once monumental and ghostly. The colours
that faintly illuminate this noble yet nightmare world are charged
as deeply as the forms with the artist's intense emotion and they both
explain and enhance them. In all he filled two sketchbooks and made
about a hundred large drawings: standing, seated or reclining figures
hieratic and immobile yet subtly expressive of Moore's humanity,
encompassed by vast shadowy spaces brought to a vibrant life by
the depths and brilliances of his colour. If there exist any works by
Moore more impressive than the Shelter Drawings they are the
sketchbooks in which he set down his recollections of the figures
and their settings which he observed on his nightly visits under
ground, and the original ideas for the finished drawings. These two
small books-reservoirs of concentrated imaginative power-have
to my thinking a place among Moore's most moving works. Modern
works which say more in so small a compass do not come easily to
mind: they are worthy of the words which Moore himself applied
to massive carvings, the Sumerian sculptures in the British Museum,
as being of 'a contained bull-like grandeur and held-in energy*.
It would be useful, I think, to write a few words about how these
drawings are made, for the method employed-now widely imitated
-was an innovation of Moore's.
Not long before the Second World War, when Moore was living
at his cottage near Dover, a niece called and asked him to make a
drawing for her; considerately she brought her own materials, a few
cheap crayons from Woolworth's and some water-colours. The
324 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
materials were inadequate, but her uncle set to work. Among them
was a white wax crayon, and it was when doing this kindly act that
he discovered the method, which since that time he has constantly
used, of putting in the main masses in white wax. This has several
advantages. Because the water-colour recedes from the white wax,
backgrounds can be put in almost instantaneously in broad, rapid
strokes, and the white wax may then be worked over with pen and
ink and water-colour applied in small strokes; in case of failure the
ink and water-colour applied to it may be readily washed off. The
method is productive of accidental effects of colour and texture and
it is this that has made it so widely popular. In Moore's hands the
effects are in fact so dexterously controlled that the term 'accident'
is inappropriate: he creates the conditions in which the happy-
accident is liable to occur, and promptly avails himself of it when it
does. The later water-colours of Moore so abound in exquisiteness,
gaiety, and delicate evocations of space and atmospheres that it
sometimes happens that his constant and primary concern with
powerful monumental form is overlooked. It is the use of white wax
which enables him, by putting in the principal forms at the be
ginning, thereupon to model and refine them. The method, in fact,
is directly analogous to his method as a carver. In neither is the pro
cess a building up; in both it is a seeking to discover in the original
mass of material-be it block of stone or wood or area of wax-the
forms of his imagining in the fullness of their energy and strength.
One melancholy fact about modern painters and about English
painters perhaps in a special degree is a liability to progressive loss of
creative power. In some cases a brilliant studentship is followed by a
steady decline into frigidity, an unreflective conformity, disintegra
tion or vulgarity. Millais, for example, was one of the supremely
gifted painters of a century wonderfully rich in genius, as a young
painter a dedicated being, yet of many of the productions of his later
years it could be said without injustice that they would shed no lustre
upon a painter of the meanest talents and the most trivial vision.
About few categories of men is it so difficult to generalize as it is
about painters, who are among the most highly individual of man
kind, but there is one which I would hazard, namely that capacity
for constant growth is among the surest indications of major creative
power. It was most conspicuous in Turner, the greatest visual genius
32. HENRY MOORE. Family Group (1948).
Chalk, pen and water-colour, 24f X *9f in. The Hanover Gallery* London,
HENRY MOORE 325
to be born of the English speaking peoples, less conspicuous-for all
the splendour and grace of his total achievement-in Gainsborough,
while in a little master in his way incomparable, Samuel Palmer, this
capacity simply did not exist. Among the greatest masters it is easy
to recall at random those whose growth ended only with their lives,
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt. Among the reasons
for confidence in Moore as a major talent is that he does show a
capacity for continuing growth. Indeed the very illustriousness of
the position which he has now attained militates against full recog
nition of his increasing stature. It fosters instead an indiscriminate
reverence for everything he has made. It is no part of my intention to
criticize, when it does not seem to me necessary, or to disparage the
possessions of collectors. If those, however, who had the perception
and the foresight to acquire the artist's work in the 'twenties were to
compare examples of it with examples of the Mexican and other
ancient sculpture which he assiduously studied and which he has
always been ready to admit to be the very foundation of his art, it
would be plain that many of them were little more than exercises -
powerful and perceptive but exercises none the less-in various early
styles. Then if, forgetful of who made them, they were to compare
them with the later sculpture in stone and wood and metal, with
the reclining figures and the family groups of the later 'thirties and
the 'forties, and with the shelter drawings and those which followed
them, I believe that they could hardly fail to recognize that a great
talent, after years of unending stubborn research, had emerged and
grown to become fully itself.
I have taken the Shelter Drawings as a point of departure. In fact
for a year or so before the war the drawing of Moore had assumed
a breadth and vivacity which had only rarely marked it hitherto.
What an advance upon the series already referred to, of Ideas for
Sculpture, of 1938, which are small in form, tight and directly imita
tive of sculpture in treatment, and lacking in sense of space, is
represented by such drawings, for instance as Two Women, 1 Figures
in a Setting* Standing Figures* Two Seated Women, 4 ' Two Seated
Figures, 5 and Two Seated Women, 6 all made during the ensuing two
* Coll Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B. 2 Coll. Mr. Eric C. Gregory.
Coll Mrs. Ursula Goldfinger. 4 Coll. Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B.
5 The Tate Gallery, London. 6 The Tare Gallery, London,
326 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
years, which possess all that the others conspicuously lack. But
beautiful as many of them are, these immediate predecessors of the
Shelter Drawings are surpassed by their successors.
Moore's advance, however, was not resumed immediately after
the completion of the Shelter Drawings. These number about one
hundred in all. From the middle of 1940 until late the following year
these drawings absorbed all his interest and he did nothing else. But
at that time the air raids became infrequent and the shelters empty.
The War Artists' Advisory Committee, which commissioned a
number of the Shelter Drawings, asked him to make a series of coal-
miners at work. This project took him to his native Castleford,
where he spent two or three weeks down the mine. Although he
had lived the first twenty years of his life in Castleford and came of a
family of miners, he had never before been down a coal-mine, and
although he welcomed the experience the results did not satisfy him.
It made clear many things about my own childhood (for my father
was a coal miner) and made me know more about miners, [he said] but
I didn't find it as fruitful a subject as the shelters. The shelter drawings
came about after first being moved by the experience of them, whereas
the coal-mine drawings were more like a commission. 1
Judged by the standard set by the Shelter Drawings the coal-miners
fall short in dramatic power, having neither the nobility of form, of
spacial relation, nor the strangely singing colour. The one scene
represented a unique many-sided drama, the other a routine occupa
tion pursued in a narrow space. But the mining theme, prosaic as it
must have seemed to an imagination attuned to the courage and the
tenderness, the terror and the death-like exhaustion of the shelters,
and their eerie vastness, did evoke drawings a few of which, such for
instance as At the Coal Face*'* of 1942, must be placed only just
below his best. The energetic tautness of the miners' figures as they
hacked at the coal face first taught him how to incorporate the male
figure into his family of forms, in which it had hitherto played a
negligible part. He had never willingly drawn male figures before,
having believed in the validity of static forms, forms in repose.
1 'Catalogue of the Henry Moore retrospective exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1946'; Introduction by James Johnson Sweeney, p. 71.
2 The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
3 The City Art Galleries, Glasgow.
HENRY MOORE 327
Down the coal-mine he discovered the possibilities of the figure in
action. His few works at the coal face beneath his native town thus
made an essential contribution towards, among others, his most
splendid bronzes, Family Group? of 1945-9, and King and Queen? of
1953-4-
Before long, however, he entered upon the most richly creative
years of his life. To attempt to assess his sculpture is outside the scope
of this study, but he has made many drawings which surpass even
the shelterers, particularly in respect of one of his most obsessive
ambitions: to make space.
Spaces between forms, holes in things, are always an obsession with
me. Space is an element as important as what is solid and material.
[I quote his words to me.] Turner in his old age made space in its
way as positive as a tree trunk, even Matisse, whose painting looks
flat, made space in which things can be exactly placed.
In the finest of the later drawings the monumentality of the Shelter
Drawings is sustained and sometimes even enhanced, the colour is
more aerial, but the space has opened out and the relations between
the forms have grown more complex. These qualities are exempli
fied in such drawings as Group of Figures in a Setting* of 1942, Group
of draped Standing Figures* Crowd looking at a tied-up object, 5 also of
1942, Girl reading to Woman and Child* of 1946 (Plate 31), in which
the crowd and the tied-up object are seen through the window of a
domestic interior. Seated Figure, 1 also of 1946, and Family Group, 8
of 1948 (Plate 32).
The year 1946 marks for Moore a further step towards a still tuller
humanism. In that year his daughter Mary was born and the effects
of this event are immediately reflected in both his choice of subjects
and his treatment of them. Domestic scenes, such as Two Women
bathing a Baby* drawn shortly after Mary's birth, become common,
as well as mothers and children, family groups and the like. These
* Commissioned for the Barclay School, Stevenage. Casts at the Tate Gallery
and elsewhere. xyr-jju
* Commissioned by the City of Antwerp for the Open-Air Museum, Middle-
Coll. Mr. Paul Magriel. < Coll. Mr. Karl Radian.
* Coll. Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B. 6 Coll. Mrs. H D. Walston.
' The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Massey CoUection).
8 The Hanover Gallery, London. 9 Coll. Mrs. H. D. Walston.
328 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
subjects are suffused with a gentle lyricism rarely manifest in his
work before. Moore is able to add new qualities without the sacrifice
of the old. Just as he was able to assimilate the humanism of the
Mediterranean to his form-system in the Shelter Drawings without
discarding anything he had learnt from ancient sculpture, so in these
latest drawings is he able to imbue his subjects with a lyrical tender
ness without loss either of monumentality or of relation to the
elemental forces of nature. All these elements are radiantly present in
Girl reading to Woman and Child: surely one of the finest of Moore's
works in any medium.
Speaking of the relation between sculpture and drawing Moore
told me that he considered that
sculpture, involving a life-long struggle to grasp reality in terms of
three dimensions, is the most intellectually and imaginatively exacting
pursuit I can conceive of. It's an endless pursuit, even Michelangelo,
the greatest of the great, pressed on with it until the end of his fife.
But drawing enables a sculptor to get atmosphere round his figures-
to give them an environment, above all a foreground.
It is too early to try to judge what place Moore will occupy when
distorting fashion and current controversy have passed away, but I
believe that his creation of a three-dimensional reality in which a
remote grandeur is tempered by a large-hearted humanity and
encompassed in an atmosphere which intensifies its meaning will not
quickly be forgotten.
BIOGRAPHIES
DE MAISTRJE, LERor LEVESON LAURENT JOSEPH, b. 1894
Painter, both abstract and figurative, of religious subjects, portraits and
still-life. Born 27 March 1894 in New South Wales, Australia. Educated
privately. Studied painting at the Royal Art Society of N.S.W. under
Datillo Rubbo and Norman Carter and then at Sydney Art School under
Julian Ashton. First one-man show at Sydney 1927. Won Society of
Artists travelling scholarship 1923 and went to Paris. Exhibited at Paris
Salon 1924. Represented in Australian section of Biennale 1926. First
London one-man show 1929 at Beaux-Arts Gallery. Worked in Paris
1923-6, in Australia 1926-9, again in France, particularly in St. Jean
de Luz, from 1929 to 1932, in Paris and London oetween 1932 and 1938
and since then in London. Between 1939 and 1943 in the Foreign
Relations Branch of the British Red Cross (French Section), doing
no painting between 1939 and the end of 1942. Other exhibitions
include Bernheim Jeune, Paris 1931, Mayor Gallery, London 1934,
Temple Newsam, Leeds 1943, Birmingham 1946, Adams Gallery,
London 1950, and Hanover Gallery, London 1953. His work has also been
shown in New York.
GERTLER, MARK, 1891-1939
Painter of figure subjects, portraits and still-life. Born 9 December 1891
in Spitalfields, London, of Polish-Jewish parentage. Went with his family
to Austria 1893-8. Spoke only Yiddish up to the age of eight, and was
originally called Marks. Educated at the Deal Lane Elementary School.
Began attending classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic but in 1907
entered a glass-painting factory. 1908 sent by the Jewish Educational Aid
Society to the Slade School. 1909 won a Slade Scholarship and a certifi
cate for painting; 1910 first prize for head-painting and second prize for
painting from die cast. 1912 left the Slade and won a British Institute
scholarship. Joined the New English Art Club 1912 and the London
Group 1915. His Fruit Sorters was bought by the Contemporary Art
Society in 1914. Worked in London and at Garsington, near Oxford.
Visited Paris 1919, and in subsequent years the south of France for the sake
of his health. First one-man show at the Goupil Gallery 1921. Married
Marjorie Hodgkinson 1930. Began teaching at die Westminster Technical
Institute 1932. Died by his own hand 23 June 1939 at Highgate. Memorial
exhibitions of his work were held at the Leicester Galleries 1941, the Ben
Uri Art Gallery 1944, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery 1949.
329
330 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
GRANT, DUNCAN JAMES CORROWR, b. 1885
Painter and decorator, designer of textiles, pottery and for the theatre.
Born 21 January 1885 at Rothiemurchus, Inverness-shire. Spent his early
years in India. Destined for the Army he was educated at St. Paul's but,
on the persuasion of his aunt Lady Strachey, was allowed to go to the
Westminster School of Art in 1902. Visited Italy and copied Masaccio.
Studied under J.-E. Blanche in Paris 1906 and then for six months at the
Slade. Travelled in Sicily, Tunisia and Greece. Through his cousin,
Lytton Strachey, entered the Bloomsbury circle of Roger Fry, Clive and
Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Was influenced by the works of the
Fauves and Cezanne in the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910
and contributed to its successor in 1912. Worked with Roger Fry in the
Omega Workshops, founded in 1913. Member of the Camden Town
Group 1911, and of the London Group 1919. First one-man show at the
Carfax Gallery 1920. Represented at the Venice Biennale 1926 and 1932.
At Cassis, near Marseilles, in 1927 and 1928. Member of the London
Artists' Association 1929-31. His decorations for the 'Queen Mary' were
rejected in 1935.
INNES, JAMES DICKSON, 1887-1914
Painter mainly of mountain landscapes but also occasionally of figure
subjects. Born 27 February 1887 at Llanelly, Carmarthenshire, of Catalan
descent on his mother's side. Educated at Christ's College, Brecon.
Studied painting at Carmarthen, 1904-5, and the Slade, 1905-8. Exhibited
at the New English Art Club from 1907; became a member of this
and the Camden Town Group in 1911. Visited the Cevennes and the
French Pyrenees, 1908; in Paris, winter 1909; again in these places in
1910 and 1912, and also in Spain accompanied by Derwent Lees, and at
Marseilles in 1913 with Augustus John. Also worked with John in the
spring and summer of 1911 and 1912 in North Wales. Went to Morocco
and Teneriffe 1913 for his health but died of consumption at Swanley,
Kent, 22 August 1914. Memorial Exhibitions of his work were held at
the Tate Gallery 1921-2 and the Chenil Galleries 1923. A retrospective
exhibition was held at the Leicester Galleries 1952.
JONES, DAVID MICHAEL, b. 1895
Painter, chiefly in water-colour, of portraits, of animal, landscape and
legendary and mythological and religious subjects, wood-engraver and
designer of inscriptions; also a writer. Born I November 1895 in Brockley,
Kent, of Welsh descent on his father's side. As a boy exhibited drawings
of animals with the Royal Drawing Society. 1909 entered Camberwell
BIOGRAPHIES 33!
School of Art and studied under A. S. Hartrick, who had worked with
Van Gogh and Gauguin, Reginald Savage and Herbert Cole. Served in
France with the Royal Welch Fusiliers 1915-18. 1919 obtained a Govern
ment grant to study at the Westminster School of Art under Walter
Bayes and Bernard Meninsky. Became a Catholic in 1921; in 1922 joined
Eric Gill's Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic at Ditchling, Sussex.
Returned to London 1924, but rejoined Gill at Capel-y-ffin in 1925.
First work as illustrator in 'In Petra' by Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler, 1923 ;
first illustrations for the Golden Cockerel Press 'Gulliver's Travels' 1925.
1927 returned to live with his parents at Brockley and spent some time
on the coast at Portskde, near Hove. 1927 exhibited sea pictures and
Welsh drawings at the St. George's Gallery. Joined Society of Wood
Engravers 1927. 1929 exhibition at the Goupil Gallery included French
water-colours painted at Salies de Beam, Lourdes and Arcachon. Member
of Seven and Five Society, 1928-33. Works shown at Chicago in 1933,
Venice Biennale 1934, and the World's Fair, New York, in 1939. His
chief writings are c ln Parenthesis' 1937, tie Hawthornden Prize Novel
for 1938, and 'The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing'
1952, awarded the Russell Loines Award for Poetry by the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, U.S.A., in May 1954. Has held a number of
one-man shows at the Redfern Gallery: in 1944 a C.E.M.A. exhibition
toured England and Wales, and in 1954 an Arts Council Exhibition
visited Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Swansea, Edinburgh and the Tate Gallery,
London. Created C.B.E. 1955.
LEWIS, PERCY WYNDHAM, b. c. 1884
Painter and draughtsman, novelist, critic, political theorist and pamphleteer.
Born 1882 or December 1884 in Nova Scotia or the U.S.A. according to
different accounts; of British parents. Educated at Rugby. 1898-1901
studied at the Skde School where he won a scholarship at the age of
sixteen. 1902-8 worked in Paris, Germany, including six months at the
Heimann Academy, Munich, Holland and Spain. Returned to England;
works occasionally exhibited at the Carfax Gallery. Member of Camden
Town Group 1911. Exhibited in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition
at the Grafton Galleries 1912, Original member of the London Group
1913. Worked briefly with Roger Fry in the Omega Workshops; then in
1914 broke away and formed the Rebel Art Centre with Wadsworth,
Etchells, C. F. Hamilton and (later) William Roberts. Founded the
Vorticist Group 1914-15 and edited its paper 'Blast'. 1914 issued a folio of
twenty drawings of 'Timon of Athens', and wrote his first novel 'Tarr',
published serially in c The Egoist', 1916-17, and as a book 1918. The first
(and only) Vorticist Exhibition at the Dor6 Galleries, 1915. Served with
the Artillery 1915-17; 1917-18 Official War Artist to the Canadian Corps
Headquarters; exhibition 'Guns' of pictures of war subjects at the Goupil
332 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Gallery 1919. With Louis F. Ferguson published 'Harold Oilman: An
Appreciation', 1919. Organized the exhibition of Group X at the Man
sard Gallery 1920. His second one-man exhibition, 'Tyros and Portraits',
at the Leicester Galleries 1921. Edited the art reviews 'The Tyro', 1921-2,
and 'The Enemy', 1927-9. 1922-6 period of semi-retirement, ended by
the General Strike. 1928 published the novel *The Childermass', intended
as the first part of a trilogy: in 1951 the B.B.C. commissioned the sequels,
'Monstre Gai' and 'Malign Fiesta'; the complete triology, known as
'The Human Age', broadcast in 1955. 1929 married Anne Hoskyns. 1932
exhibition 'Thirty Personalities' at the Lefevre Galleries; exhibited at the
Leicester Galleries 1937 and the Beaux-Arts Gallery 1938. In 1938 the
rejection of his portrait of T. S. Eliot by the Royal Academy resulted in
the resignation of Augustus John. 1939 reprinted his writings on art
together with a survey of his career as a painter in 'Wyndham Lewis the
Artist: from Blast to Burlington House'. In Canada and the U.S.A.
1940-8. Retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery 1949. Exhibi
tion of water-colours at Victoria College, Toronto, 1950. Published
autobiographical 'Rude Assignment' 1950: 'The Demon of Progress in
the Arts' 1954. Lost his sight in 1951.
LOWRY, LAURENCE STEPHEN, b. 1887
Painter chiefly of industrial landscape in Manchester and Salford. Born
i November 1887 at Old Trafford, Manchester. Studied at the Schools
of Art in Manchester 1908-9 and Salford. Lived at Pendlebury 1909-48,
since then at the village of Mottram in Longendale. Member of the
Royal Society of British Artists 1934, and of the Manchester Group.
First one-man exhibition in London at the Lefevre Gallery 1939 and
at Manchester in 1948. Hon. M.A. (Manchester) 1945. Member of the
London Group 1948. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at
the Salford Art Gallery 1951. A.R.A. 1955. .
MOORE, HENRY SPENCER, b. 1898
Sculptor in stone, wood and later in bronze, and draughtsman. Born
30 July 1898 at Castleford, Yorks., the seventh child of a miner. Educated
at Castleford Grammar School; taught in his elementary school 1916.
Served 1917-19 in the ijth London Regiment; gassed and invalided
home 1917. 1919 resumed teaching, but later die same year went to
Leeds School of Art, remaining there until 1921. 1921-4 at the Royal
College of Art under Derwent Wood and Sir William Rothenstein,
winning a travelling scholarship there in 1924 which took him, in 1924,
to France and Italy. 1924-31 taught at the Royal College of Art, 1931-9
at the Chelsea School of Art. First one-man show at the Warren Gallery
BIOGRAPHIES 333
1928. His work was shown at exhibitions in Venice and Berlin 1929,
Stockholm 1930, Zurich 1931, Hamburg 1932 and New York 1943.
Married Irina Radetsky in 1929. A daughter was born in 1946. Member
of the London Group 1930-7. Exhibited at the International Surrealist
Exhibition at London 1936, and Paris 1938. Visited Spain in 1937, New
York in 1946, Greece in 1951, and Paris and Italy on several occasions.
1940 drawings of Underground shelter scenes purchased by the War
Artists' Advisory Committee; drawings of coal-miners at work com
missioned. Among other public commissions executed Madonna and
Child for St. Matthew's Church, Northampton, 1943-4. Retrospective
exhibitions of sculpture and drawings at Temple Newsam, Leeds, in
1941, New York in 1946, and San Francisco in 1947, Australia in 1947-8,
the Venice Biennale (where he was awarded the International Sculpture
Prize) and Milan in 1948, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Dussel-
dorf, Berne and Athens in 1949-51, the Tate Gallery, London 1951, Cape
Town and Sweden in 1952, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Germany
i953-4> Sao Paolo Biennale 1953-4 (where he was awarded the Inter
national Prize for Sculpture), and Basle and Jugoslavia in 1955. Exhibitions
of drawings were shown in Mexico 1950, Berlin and Vienna 1951, and
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London,- in 1953. He was a
Trustee of the Tate Gallery 1941-8 and again from 1949, a member of the
Art Panel of the Arts Council 1945-51 and since 1948 a member of the
Royal Fine Art Commission, London. Made Honorary Doctor of Letters
of the University of Leeds 1945, Membre Correspondent of the Belgian
Academy and Honorary Associate of the Royal Institute of British
Architects, London, in 1948, a foreign member of the Swedish Royal
Academy of Fine Arts, in 1951, Honorary Doctor of Letters of the
University of London 1953, and Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. Created C.H. 1955.
NASH, JOHN NORTHCOTE, b. 1893
Painter of landscape and still-life, wood-engraver and illustrator, parti
cularly of botanical publications. Born in Kensington, n April 1893,
brother of Paul Nash. Moved with his family to Iver Heath, Buckingham
shire in 1901. Educated at Langley Place, Slough, and Wellington College.
At first thought of becoming a journalist and worked for some months
as a reporter on a local paper. Without academic training but encouraged
by his brother, started working at water-colour landscapes and imaginary
comic drawings. In 1913 held a successful exhibition with his brother at
the Dorien Leigh Galleries, South Kensington, as a result of which he was
invited to become a member of the London Group and the Friday Club.
1914 began painting in oils. 1915 invited by Harold Gilman to join the
Cumberland Market Group; May 1915 exhibited at the Goupil Gallery
with three others of the Group, Gilman, Charles Ginner and Robert
334 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Bevan. About this time executed two mural decorations for a restaurant.
In 1915 Leeds City Art Gallery accepted a drawing Trees in a Flood,
his first work to enter a public gallery. Served with Artists' Rifles,
November 1916 to January 1918. Official War Artist 1918. May 1918
married Dorothy Christine Kuhlenthal. 1918-21 lived at Gerrards Cross
with summer excursions to Whiteleaf in the Chiltern Hills and Glou
cestershire. 1921 became first art critic on 'The London Mercury*. 1919
elected member of the New English Art Club; 1921 of Society of Wood
Engravers. In the same year involved with seven other artists, Paul Nash,
Edward Wadsworth, Jacob Kramer, Albert Rutherston, Stanley Spencer,
Gilbert Spencer and P. H. Jowett, in the abortive project for decorating
Leeds Town Hall. His first wood-engravings also date from 1921 and were
included in his first one-man show at the Goupil Gallery, together with
oils and water-colours. 1921 moved to Princes Risborough and began
teaching at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, where he remained
until 1927. Became member of the Modern English Water-colour
Society 1923. Worked in Dorset 1923, in Bath and Bristol 1924. In Essex
and Suffolk 1929 where he bought a summer cottage. One-man shows at
the Goupil Gallery October 1930 and at the French Gallery May 1933.
Taught at the Royal College of Art 1934-40. Executed large decoration
for Paris Exhibition 1937. One-man show of water-colours at the Goupil
Gallery 1939. Joined Observer Corps 1939. Official War Artist to the
Admiralty 1940; demobilized 1944 and went to live in Essex. Rejoined
staff of Royal College 1945. A.R.A. 1940. R.A. 1951. Retrospective
exhibition at Leicester Galleries 1954.
NASH, PAUL, 1889-1946
Landscape painter in oils and water-colour, book-illustrator, writer, and
designer of applied art. Born n May 1889 at Kensington, son of the
Recorder of Abingdon and elder brother of John Nash. Moved to Iver
Heath, Bucks., in 1901. 1904-6 at St. Paul's School 1906-9 attended
evening classes at Bolt Court, Fleet Street, 1910-12 studied at the Slade
School under Brown and Tonks. First one-man exhibition of drawings
and water-colours at the Carfax Gallery 1912. Joint exhibitions with John
Nash at the Dorien Leigh Gallery, South Kensington, 1913, and at Leeds,
1914, and both invited to exhibit in the Twentieth Century Art Exhibition
at Whitechapel 1914. 1914 worked under Roger Fry at the Omega
Workshops and on restoring the Mantegna Cartoons at Hampton Court.
Member of the Friday Club 1913 and London Group 1914. December
1914 married Margaret Theodosia Odeh. August 1914 enlisted with the
Artists' Rifles; invalided home from France 1917 and appointed Official
War Artist as a result of his exhibition * Ypres Salient at the Goupil
Gallery July 1917. Exhibition Void of War' at the Leicester Galleries
1918. Member of the New English Art Club 1919, and of the Society of
BIOGRAPHIES 333
Wood Engravers 1922. Lived at Dymchurch, Kent 1921-5. First visit to
Paris 1922. Instructor in Design at the Royal College of Art, 1924-5
Lived in or near Rye 1925-33, again visiting France 1929-30. Repre
sented at the Venice Biennale 1926, 1932 and 1938. September 1931
British Representative on the International Jury for the Carnegie Exhibi
tion, Pittsburgh, U.S.A. Founded Unit One 1933. Visited France, Spain
and North Africa, 1933-4- In Dorset 1934-5, compiling the Shell Guide
to Dorset. Returned to London 1936. Exhibited at the International
Surrealist Exhibitions at London, 1936 and Paris, 1938. Settled in Oxford
1939- Official War Artist to the Air Ministry 1940-5; also commissioned
by the War Artists' Advisory Committee 1941. 1943 exhibition of
applied designs circulated by C.E.M.A.; retrospective exhibitions at
Temple Newsam, Leeds, 1943 and Cheltenham 1945. Died n July 1946
at Boscombe, Hants. Memorial exhibitions at the Tate Gallery 1948 and
in Canada 1949-50; an exhibition of his photographs was given by the
Arts Council 1951 and a book of his photographs, 'Fertile Image', was
published the same year; a collection of his water-colours and drawings
was shown at the Leicester Galleries 1953. His illustrations include those
to 'Genesis', 1922, and 'Urne Burial!' and 'The Garden of Cyrus' 1932.
A fragment of autobiography together with some letters and essays were
published posthumously as 'Outline' in 1949; his correspondence with
Gordon Bottomley as 'Poet and Painter' in 1955.
NEVINSON, CHRISTOPHER RICHARD WYNNE, 1889-1946
Figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer. Born 13 August
1889 in Hampstead, son of the war correspondent and author H. W.
Nevinson. Educated at Uppingham. Studied painting at St John's Wood,
the Slade, and in Paris, Julian's and the Circle Russe. In Paris shared a
studio with Modigliani. First exhibited 1910 at the Friday Club and with
the Allied Artists at the Albert Hall. Closely identified with the Futurist
Movement: friendly with Sevcrini and Marinetti; published a joint mani
festo 'Vital English Art' with Marinetti, 1914. Lectured on modern art at
theDor Galleries. The first secretary to the London Group, 1914. Married
Kathleen Mary Knowlman 1915. Served as an ambulance driver in the
Red Cross 1914 and then until 1916 in the Royal Army Medical Corps
until invalided out with rheumatic fever. Exhibited war paintings in 1916,
and was appointed Official War Artist in 1917, exhibiting again in 1918
at the Leicester Galleries. Invited by the Czecho-Slovak Republic to
represent British Art in Prague 1920. Visited U.S.A. in 1919 and 1920 and
exhibited there; represented as an etcher at the Biennale the same year.
Member of the New English Art Club 1929, and of the Royal Society
of British Artists 1932. A.K.A. 1939. Chevalier of the Legion of Honour
1938. Author of autobiography 'Paint and Prejudice*, 1937. Died in
London 7 October 1946.
336 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
NICHOLSON, BEN, b. 1894
Painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscape and
still-life. Born 10 April 1894 in Denham, Bucks., the eldest son of (Sir)
William Nicholson and his wife Mabel Pryde, also a painter and the sister
of James Pryde. Educated Gresham's School (one year). Studied art at
the Slade for one year 1910-11. Studied French at Tours, 1911-12, and
Italian at Milan, 1912-13; in Madeira 1913-14. 1914-17 in London and
N. Wales; 1917-18 in Pasadena, California. From 1920 to 1931 in Castag-
nola (Switzerland), Cumberland and London. First one-man show
Adelphi Gallery, 1922; exhibited with Winifred Nicholson at the
Paterson's Gallery 1923, with Christopher Wood and W. Staite Murray
at the Beaux-Arts Gallery 1926, and with Barbara Hepworth at Tooths'
1932. Member of the Seven and Five Society 1925-36; member of
London Artists' Association 1932; member of Unit One 1933; member
of 'Abstraction- Creation' Paris 1933-4. His works shown at Venice in
1934, Brussels and Lucerne in 1935, Amsterdam and New York in 1936.
Co-editor withj. L. Martin and N. Gabo of 'Circle' 1937. Represented
in the British section of the International Exhibition, New York, in 1939.
Retrospective exhibition at Temple Newsam, Leeds 1944. First prize for
painting at the 39th International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute,
Pittsburgh 1952. Retrospective exhibition at the Biennale, Venice 1954,
being awarded the 'Ulissi' Prize; this was subsequently shown at Amster
dam, Paris, Brussels, Zurich and Tate Gallery, London 1954-5; since 1940
has lived at St. Ives, Cornwall.
ROBERTS, WILLIAM PATRICK, b. 1895
Painter of groups of figures and of portraits. Born 5 June 1895 in London,
the son of a carpenter. Educated at an L.C.C. School. Served one year as
apprentice to a firm of commercial designers at the age of fourteen; then
studied at St. Martin's School of Art and (1910-13) die Slade. Worked
briefly at Omega Workshops under Roger Fry; in 1914 joined Wyndham
Lewis in the Rebel Art Centre and its successors, the Vorticist Group of
1914 and Group X, 1920. Member of the London Group 1915. Official
War Artist 1917-18 and again in the Second World War. Member of the
London Artists' Association 1929-32. Represented at the Venice Biennale
1932.
SPENCER, GILBERT, b. 1892
Painter in oil and water-colour of landscapes, portraits, figure-composi
tions and mural decorations. Born 4 August 1892 at Cookham, Berks.,
brother of Stanley Spencer. Educated at the Ruskin School, Maidenhead
1909-11. Studied at Camberwell School, the Royal College of Art
(wood-carving), and under Brown and Tonks at the Slade School
-15 and 1919-20. In his first period at the Slade he won first prize for
BIOGRAPHIES 337
figure-drawing and Professor Brown's prize for the drawing of the head,
and shared the Summer Composition prize in 1914. Served with the
Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonika and the Eastern Mediterranean
1915-19. Member of New English Art Club 1919. First one-man show at
the Goupil Gallery 1923. Has worked mainly in Berkshire, Oxfordshire,
of Dorset and the Lake District. Painted murals of the Foundation Legend
Balliol College at Holywell Manor, Oxford, 1934-6. Professor of Paint
ing at Royal College of Art 1932-48. Official War Artist 1940-3. Head of
Department of Painting, Glasgow School of Art 1948-50, and Camber-
well School 1950. A.R.A. 1950.
SPENCER, STANLEY, b. 1891
Painter of landscapes, occasional portraits, and in particular of imaginative
and religious subjects. Born 30 June 1891 at Cookham, Berks., son of
William Spencer, organist and music teacher. 1907 entered Maidenhead
Technical Institute. 1908-12 studied at the Slade School under Tonks;
awarded a scholarship 1910, the Melvill Nettleship Prize and the Com
position Prize 1912. Exhibited at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition
1912. 1915-18 served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal
Berkshire Regiment, mainly in Macedonia; commissioned to paint a war
picture. 1919-27 member of the New English Art Club. 1922 visited
Jugoslavia with the Carline family, which included the artists Sydney and
Richard. 1922-3 at Poole with Henry Lamb and 1923-7 painted The
Resurrection, Cookham in Henry Lamb's London studio. 1925 married
Anne Hilda Carline. 1926-32 wall paintings, The Oratory of All Souls,
Burghclere, living there 1927-32. First one-man show at the Goupil
Gallery in 1927. Lived at Cookham 1932-8. A.R.A. 1932; resigned 1935;
again A.R.A. and R.A. 1950. Represented at Venice Biennale 1932 and
1938. Visited Switzerland 1933 ^d I93<$. Awarded an Honourable
Mention at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1933. Visited St. Ives and
Southwold 1937. In London 1938-9. Loan exhibition of early works at
the Leger Gallery 1939. Moved to Leonard Stanley, Glos., summer 1939-
1940 commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to paint
pictures of shipyards in Glasgow. Moved to Epsom 1941; returned to
Cookham 1945. Retrospective exhibition at Temple Newsam, Leeds
1947. Created C.B.E. 1950. Visited China as member of a cultural delega
tion 1953. A retrospective exhibition of drawings arranged by the Arts
Council was on tour I954-5J a retrospective exhibition of his paintings
was held at the Tate Gallery, of his drawings at the Arts Council in 1955-
WADSWORTH, EDWARD ALEXANDER, 1889-1949
Painter, chiefly in tempera, of views of harbours and ^coast-lines; of
occasional abstract compositions and portraits; and of stiU-kfe. Engraver
on wood and copper. Born 29 October 1889 at Cleckheaton, Yorkshire.
338 MODERN ENGLISH PAINTERS
Educated at the Fettes College, Edinburgh. Went to Munich 1906 to study
engineering and while there attended the Knirr Art School; afterwards
studied at Bradford School of Art and 1908-12 at the Slade School
where he won the first prize for figure painting in 1911. Associated with
Wyndham Lewis in the Vorticist and X Groups; an original member of
London Group 1913. Served 1914-17 in the R.N.V.R.; engaged on
dazzle camouflage for ships 1917-18. Published two books of drawings
and copper engravings respectively: 'The Black Country ', 1920, and 'The
Sailing Ships and Barges of the Western Mediterranean and Adriatic
Seas', 1926. Member at various times of the New English Art Club from
1921, Unit One 1934, A.R.A., 1943. Died 21 June 1949 in London. A
memorial Exhibition of his work was held at the Tate Gallery in 1951.
INDEX
Page references in bold type refer to the sections of the book dealing with
that particular artist.
Abstract Art, Philosophy of, 270-9
Abstraction, 159, 261
Acton, Lord, 41
Adeney, Bernard, 51
Adoration of Old Men (Stanley Spencer), 190
After a Push (C. R. W. Nevinson), 146
Agony in the Garden, The (El Greco), 296
Aldington, Richard, 33, 133
Aldridge, John, 309
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 273, 275
Antonello da Messina, 124
Aphrodite in Aulis (David Jones), 304, 306
Apple Gatherers, The (Stanley Spencer), 173
Apple Woman and her Husband, The (Mark
Gertler), 210, 211
Aragon, Louis, 184
Arenig (J. D. Innes), 70, 72
Artist's Mother, The (Mark Gertler), 210
Artist's Sister, The (Mark Gertler), 211
Artist's Wife, Portrait of the (Wyndham
Lewis), 36
Artist's Wife, The (Gilbert Spencer), 232
Ashton, Howard, 254
Ashton, Julian, 248
Atkinson, Lawrence, 131, 13 3
At the Coal Face (Henry Moore), 326
Au Chat Bott (Ben Nicholson), 266
Ijackground for a Venetian Ballet (Duncan
Grant), 50
Bacon, Francis, 247, 258
Bagdad: a panel (Wyndham Lewis), 37
Bala Lake (J, 0. Innes), 70
Balcony, Cros de Cagnes (Paul Nash), 109
Balliol College, 232
Balston, Thomas, xi, 215, 219
Barbizon School, 234
Barges on the Thames (C. R. W. Nevinson),
146
Barr, Alfred H., 127, 138
Basket of Fruit (Mark Gertler), 129
Battery Position in a Wood, A (Wyndham
Lewis), 34
Battery Shelled, A (Wyndham Lewis), 3?
Bawden, Edward, 309
Baxter, T. T., 225
Bayes, Walter, 295. 2 9<5
Bcardsley, Aubrey, 293
Bchrend, Mr. and Mrs. J. L., 166, 181, 182
Bell dive, 48, 49. 59, 6r, 62, 129
Bell, Quentin, 58, 59
Bell, Vanessa, 48, 49, 58, 59
Bennett, Arnold, 105, 140, 153
Benson, E. F., 117
Berenson, Bernard, 287, 307, 316
Bergson, 29, 31, 32
Bertram, Anthony, 116, 117, 118, 278, 279
Betjeman, John, 187
Betrayal, The (Stanley Spencer), 179
Bevan, R. P,, 67, 237, 238, 239
Bicycle Boys (William Roberts), 288
Binyon, Laurence, 284
Bird Garden, The (Paul Nash), 98
Blackwood, Algernon, 117
Blake, <58, 95, 109, 112, 113, 117, 168, 244,
296
Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 48
Bloomsbury Circle, 14, 15, 41, 45, 49. 5^, 5<5,
59,61
Boccioni, Umberto, 120, 130
Bomberg, David, 28, 32, 33, 131, 133
Bone, Sir Muirhead, 164
Borrow, George, 109, 117
Boston, Lady, 172
Botticelli, 85
Bottomley, Gordon, 98, 236, 240, 241, 244
BozoulsnearRodez (oil) (J. D. Innes), 66
Bozouls near Rodez (water-colour) (J. D.
Innes), 66
Brangwyn, Sir Frank, 195
Braque, Georges, 35, 80, 127, 128, 266, 302
Breton, Andr6, in
Bronze Ballet (Edward Wads worth), 159, 163
Bronzino, 62
Brown, Ford Madox, 81, 211, 225, 231
Browne, Sir Thomas, no, in, 244
Brueghel, 56, 85
Buchan,John (Lord Tweedsmuir), 103
Burdens (Gilbert Spencer), 229
Burdett, Basil, 246
Burne-Jones, 47
Burra, Edward, 100, 157
Bussy, Simon, 47, 53, 60
Campbell, Roy, 17, *9
Canadian Gunpit, A (Wyndham Lewis), 34
Canadian War Memorial, Vimy (Paul Nash),
105
Carman, Gilbert, 215
Carline family, 333
Carline, Sydney, 244, 333
339
340
INDEX
Carter, Norman, 248
'Cassandra*, 160
Cedar Tree, Cookham (Stanley Spencer), 174
Cennini, Cennino, 152
Centurion's Servant, The (Stanley Spencer),
174
Cezanne, 30, 49, 50, 54, 61, 67, 121, 126, 129,
147, 149, 218, 219, 230, 234, 249, 255,
265, 266
'Chacmool', 315, 316
Chapel Perilous, The (David Jones'), 304
Chaplin, Charlie, 222
Chardin, 48, 186, 283
Chestnut Waters (Paul Nash), no
Chou En-Lai, 172
Christ Carrying the Cross (Stanley Spencer),
179
Christ in the Wilderness (Stanley Spencer),
191
Christ praying in the Wilderness (Stanley
Spencer), 191
Churchill, Sir Winston, 79, 199
Chute, Father Desmond, 298
Circle of the Monoliths (Paul Nash), 112
Clark, Sir Kenneth, 57, 58, 166
Claude le Lorrain, 283
Clutton-Brock, Arthur, 140
Coast Scene (Paul Nash), 108
Cole, Ernest, 313
Cole, Herbert, 293
Cole, Horace, 54, 62, 75, 76
Coleridge, 95, in, 117, 294
Collins, Cecil, 177
Column on the March (C. R. W. Neviuson),
139
Composition (Edward Wadsworth), 160
Constable, 61, 62, 66, 71, 85, 101, 112, 113,
151, 171, 197, 227, 234, 283, 286
Copeau, Jacques, 52
Cornfield, The (John Nash), 242
Corot, 54, 62, 83, 100, 283
Cotman, 66, 70, 101
Cotswold Farm, A (Gilbert Spencer), 230, 231
Courbet, 62, 181, 256
Crier by Night, The (Paul Nash), 95
Cros de Cagnes (Paul Nash), 109
Crowd looking at a tied-up object (Henry
Moore), 327
Crucifixion (Roy de Maistre), 247, 256
Cubism, 1 8, 24, 25, 34, 35, 108, 125, 126,
127, 128, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147,
152, 171, 172, 173, 246, 254, 255
Currie, J. S., 124
JUalou, 315
Dancing Bear (David Jones) , 292
Danse, La (Matisse), 53
Dark Mountains: Brecon Beacons, The (J. D.
Innes), 70
Darwin, Robin, 244
Darwin, Sir George, Portrait o/"(Mark Gertler) ,
213
David, 151
Dawn, A (C. R. W. Nevinson), 146
Dawn, Sanctuary Wood (Paul Nash), 106
de Chirico, Giorgio, 151
Degas, 48, 85, 123
Degas Sale (1918), 54
Delacroix, 54, 95, 100, 151, 185
de Maistre, Count Joseph, 247
de Maistre, Roy, 246-259, 329
Derain, 50, 126, 220, 266
'De Rerum Natura' (Lucretius), 306
de Selincourt, Professor Oliver, Portrait of
(Gilbert Spencer), 232
Deserted Sheep Pen, The (John Nash), 243
Dickinson, Lowes, 49, 55
Dismorr, Jessie Stewart, 33
Dodgson, Campbell, 103
Donatello, 314
Dorset Girl (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Drawing for sculpture (Henry Moore), 321
Drawing (from life) (Henry Moore), 320
Dryden, 21
Duchamp, Marcel, 35
Dufy, 302
Dunkerque (Edward Wadsworth), 155
Dtirer, 85, 124
Dusting Shelves (Stanley Spencer), 188
Duveen, Lord, 166
Dwellings, OrdsallLane, Salford (L. S. Lowry),
88, 91
Dymchurch Strand (Paul Nash), 108
Dymchurch Wall (Paul Nash), 108
fcastBergholt (Constable), 85
Eates, Miss Margot, 93
Eclipse of the Sunflower, The (Paul Nash), 113
Edward VII, 54
El Greco, 25, 180, 296
Eliot, T. S., 17, 39, 40
Eliot, T. S., Portrait of (Wyndham Lewis),
37
Elliott, Clarence, 244
Eluard, Paul, in
English Futurist Manifesto, 130-3, 147
English Window Pavid Jones), 305
Epstein, Sir Jacob, 28, 32, 131
Ernst, Max, in
Etchells, Frederick, 27, 28, 33, 51, 131, 133
Expressionism, 18
Factory at Horta (Picasso), 128
Family Group (Henry Moore), 327
Farmyard in the Snow (John Nash), 243
Fauves, 149
Fauvism, 108, 126
Femme a la Mandoline (Picasso), 35
Femme Assist (Picasso), 35
INDEX
341
Figures in a Setting (Henry Moore), 325
Firing Party, The (Manet), 54
Fisherman's Harbour, St. Jean de Luz (Roy de
Maistre), 253
Flooded Trench on the Yser, The (C. R. W.
Nevinson), 139
Forain, 54
Ford, Ford Madox, 29, 33
Forster, E. M., 49
Forty Days in the Wilderness, The (Stanley
Spencer), 192
Fothergill, John, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 72,
73
Four Queens, The (David Jones), 304
Foxes Have Holes, The (Stanley Spencer), 191
Fra Angclico, 278
Fra Angelico (Ben Nicholson), 279
French Farm (Paul Nash), 109
French Girl (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Frith, W. P., 207
From an Office Window (C. R. W. Nevinson),
146
From my Studio (Gilbert Spencer), 229
Fruit Sorters (Mark Gertler), 213
Fry, Julian, 59
Fry, Roger, 15, 26, 27, 45, 49, 51, 52, 55. 5<5,
57, 59, 1*3. 129, 284, 285, 309, 312
Fulleylovc, John, 123
Futurism, 18, 23, 24, 129, 130, 132, 137, 138,
141, 142, 143
VTabo, Naum, 269
Gaddi, Taddeo, 314
Gainsborough, 62, 182, 325
Gardens in the Pound, Cookham (Stanley
Spencer), 180
Garnctt, David, 53
Garsington Village (Gilbert Spencer), 229
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 24, 28, 33, 129,
133
Gauguin, 54, 55, <$<$, 67, 71, 123, 126, 129,
249, 293, 312
Gertler, Mark, 98, 124, 200-223, 329
Gilbert Cannon at his Mill, Mr. (Mark
Gertler), 212
Gill, Eric, 169, 288, 290, 298, 299, 300, 301,
303, 308
Gill Eric (David Jones), 303
Gill, Macdonald, 51
Gilman, Harold, 23, 64, 67, 124, 237, 238
Oilman. Mrs. Harold, Portrait of (Edward
Wadsworth), 149
Ginncr, Charles, 60, 67, 238, 239, 248, 254
Giotto, 175, I9<5, 265, 314, 315 t
Girl to a Windsor Chair (Wyndham Lewis),
36
Girt reading to Woman and Child (Henry
Moore), 327
Girl with a Mandolin (Picasso), 128
Girtin, 101, 108
'Golden Bough, The* (Sir James Frazer), 294
Gore, Spencer, 26, 64, 78, 79, 124, 238
Gostick, Miss Alice, 311, 312
Goya, 85
Grant, Duncan, 33*44-62, 220, 283, 330
Green Tree with Dark Pool (Duncan Grant),
62
Greene, Graham, 90
Gris, Juan, 80
Gropius, Walter, 269
Group of draped Standing Figures (Henry
Moore), 327
Group of Figures in Setting (Henry Moore),
327
Guenever (David Jones), 304
Gwynne-Jones, Allan, 119, 120
JLJialse Town (Ben Nicholson), 270
Hamilton, C. J., 27, 131, 133
Handel, 282
Harbour Entrance (Edward "Wadsworth), 159
Harbours of England, The (Turner), 155
Harrow, Durweston, The (Stanley Spencer),
180
Hartrick, A. S., 293, 297
He Knew Degas (William Roberts), 288
Head of an Old Man (Mark Gertler), 213
Head of Eve (Duncan Grant), 50
Hebridean (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Hebridean Memory (Gilbert Spencer), 231
Hep worth, Barbara, 267, 268, 269, 309
Higher Camstabba Farm (Ben Nicholson), 270
Hill, Jason, 244
Hill ofSion, The (Stanley Spencer), 194
Hill Pastures Capel-y-ffin (David Jones) , 290
Hitchens, Ivon, 119, 309
Hodgkins, Frances, 309
Hogarth, 56
Holbein, 124
Holmes, Sir Charles, 153
Home Close, Garsington (Gilbert Spencer),
229
Hone, Evie, 309
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 294, 306
Hughes, Arthur, 72
Hulme, T. E., 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 133, 285,
286
Human Being pavid Jones), 303
Hundred Jugs, The (Sir William Nicholson),
265
Hunt, Holman, 71, 72
Husserl, 30
Hutchinson, St. John, 213
Huxley, Aldous, 46
Ideas for metal sculpture (Henry Moore), 321
Ideas for sculpture (Henry Moore), 321
Image, Selwyn, 98
Impressionism, 18, 23, 121, 249, 252, 264
342
INDEX
Impressionists, 151, 234
Ingres, 21, 54, 185
Innes, James Dickson, 63-77, 33
In the Welsh Mountains (J. D. Innes), 69
Ironside, Robin, 291, 294, 303, 308
J ames, Henry, 19
Japanese prints, 67
Japp, Darsie, 226
Jcfferies, Richard, 191
Jewish Family, The (Mark Gertler), 211
Joachim Among the Shepherds (Stanley
Spencer), 174, 175
Jockeys (William Roberts), 288
John, Augustus, 54, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76,
77. H9, 123, 124, 185, 211, 227, 246, 329
John Donne arriving in Heaven (Stanley
Spencer), 173
John, Gwen, 64, 78, 119, 246
Jones, David, ix, 289-309, 330-331
Jowett, P. H., 309, 334
Joyce, James, 19, 294
andinsky, Wassily, 19, 126, 269, 279
Keats, 95, 117
Keynes, Lady, 53
Keynes, Lord, 48, 49, 53, 54
Kinetic Feature (Paul Nash), no
King and Queen (Henry Moore), 327
Klee, Paul, 19, 38
Konody, P. G., 26
Kramer, Jacob, 33, 334
-Lamb, Euphemia, 75, 76
Lamb, Henry, ix, 181, 211, 226
Lambert, George W., 253
Landscape atlden (Paul Nash), no
Landscape at Wood Lane (Paul Nash), 101
Landscape from a Dream (Paul Nash), in
Landscape near Sheringham (John Nash), 239
Landscape of the Megaliths (Paul Nash), 112
Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (Paul Nash),
113
Lante"ri, Edouard, 315
Lasserre, Pierre, 30
Last Supper, The (Stanley Spencer), 179
'Lavcngro' (George Borrow), 96, 105
Law, Bonar, 54
Lc Corbusicr, 269
Lechmerc, Miss Kate, 28, 29, 33
Lees, Derwcnt, 65, 77
Le*ger, Fernand, 151
Lemon Gatherers, The (Duncan Grant), 50
Leonardo da Vinci, id, 151, 283, 325
Lewis, Wyndham, 13-43, 51, 52, 78, 119,
130, 131, 132, 133, 135. *47, 148, 150,
151, 1 60, 220, 265, 279, 283, 285, 286,
288,331-332
Little Girl in Spectacles (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Little Milton (Gilbert Spencer), 229
Little Western Flower (Edward Wads worth),
158
Lloyd, Marie, 125
Locke, W.J., 117
Lorenzetti, 314
Lopokova (see Keynes, Lady), 53
Love Among the Nations (Stanley Spencer),
188
Lowry, L. S., 78-91, 246, 332
Lurcat,Jean, 151
Lynd, Sylvia, 202
Lynette (Wyndham Lewis), 36
Mabel Nash (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Machen, Arthur, 117
Malory, 294
Mandolinist, The (Mark Gertler), 219
Manet, 54, 123
Mantegna, 274
Marriage at Cana, The (Stanley Spencer), 188
Marinetti, F. T., 18, 23, 24, 29, 120, 130, 132,
133, 134, 141, 147
Marseilles (Edward Wadsworth), 157
Marsh, Sir Edward, 103, 165, 222, 240
Martin, J. L., 269
Masaccio, 47, 171, 225, 229, 314, 315, 323
Mask (Henry Moore), 320
Masks (William Roberts), 288
Masterman, C. F., 103
Matisse, 49, 50, 53, 67, 80, 125, 12<5, 184, 185,
266, 302, 327
Maxwell, George, 298
May Tree, Cookham (Stanley Spencer), 180
McCarthy, Sir Desmond, 49
McEvoy, Ambrose, 64, 77
Meadow with Copse: Tower Hamlets
District (Paul Nash), io<5
Mediterranean (J. D. Innes), 69
Memory of Whithall, Gloucestershire, A
(Gilbert Spencer), 230
Mending Cowls Cookham (Stanley Spencer),
173
Menin Road, The (Paul Nash), 106
Meninsky, Bernard, 296
Merlin appears in the form of a young child to
Arthur sleeping (David Jones), 304
Michelangelo, 25, 151, 230, 260, 278, 314,
315, 325, 328
Millais, 71, 324
Milton, 1 68, 294
Mimosa Wood (Paul Nash), 109
Miro, Joan, 267, 268
Mitrailleuse, La (C, R, W. Nevimon), 139
Moat, Grange Farm, Kimble, The (John Nash),
243
Modigliani, 126
Mondriaan, Piet, 159, 260, 267, 268, 269,
281
INDEX
343
Monet, 126, 249, 286
Monster Field (Paul Nash), 112
Moonlight and Lamplight (J. D, Innes), 69
Moore, Henry, 9, 10, 269, 309, 310-328,
332-333
Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 46, 214, 226
Morris, William, 95, 117
Mrs. Keep (Gilbert Spencer), 233
Mumford, Lewis, 269
IN ash, John, 94, 234^45* 333~334
Nash, Paul, 42, 43, 92-118, 220, 235, 236,
237, 240, 241, 244, 262, 263, 280, 331,
334
Nativity, The (Stanley Spencer), 173
Nevinson, C. R. W., 24, 28, 33, 98, 119-
146, 147, 152, 335
Nevinson, Henry, 121
Newton, Eric, 85, 88, 113
New Arrivals (Gilbert Spencer), 227
Nicholson, Ben, 159, 260-282, 284, 293,
309, 336
Nicholson, Mabel, 262, 264, 281
Nicholson, Winifred, 267, 268, 309
Nicholson, Sir William, 261, 264, 265, 279,
281
Nietzsche, 214
Nocturnal Flower (Paul Nash), 113
Nocturnal Landscape (Paul Nash), 112
Novello, Ivor, 240
Nude Puncan Grant), 58
Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp), 35
Nude Study (Duncan Grant), 58
Omega Workshops, 26, 27, 28, 51, 52, 55,
60, 150, 285
On the Road to Ypres (C. R. W. Nevinson),
146
Oppy Wood, Evening, ipi; (John Nash), 241
Orcagna, 314
Orpcn, Sir William, 64, 123, 124
Ouistreham, Caen (Edward Wadsworth), 159
Over the Top: The ist Artists Rifles atMarcoing
(John Nash), 241
Painter's Studio, The (Courbet), 181
Painting (Ben Nicholson), 266
Painting, 1933 (Ben Nicholson), 268
Palmer, Samuel, 325
Pan Triumphant (C. R. W. Nevinson), 144
Pascal, 29
Patrie, La (C. R. W. Nevinson), 135
Peaches in a Basket (Allan Gwynne-Jones),
120
Pear Tree in Blossom (Dcrwent Lees), 77
Pearson, Lionel, 166
Peel Park, Salford (L. S. Lowry), 84
Pennell, Joseph, 153
Perret, Auguste, 184
Petra im Rosenhag (David Jones), 303
Picasso, Pablo, 24, 32, 33, 49, 50, 51, 62, 80,
126, 127, 128, 211, 265
Pierp della Francesca, 47, 62, 273, 275
Pieta (Roy de Maistre), 247, 256
Pill Creek, Cornwall (Ben Nicholson), 267
Pillar and Moon (Paul Nash), 113
Pinwell, George, 293
Piper, John, 309
Pissarro, Camille, 123, 129, 230, 249
Pissarro, Lucien, 238
Plato, 271, 272, 273, 275
Poised Objects (Paul Nash), no
Pollaiuolo, 286
Pond at Little Horkesley (John Nash), 243
Pond in the Fields (Paul Nash), no
Pope, Alexander, 21
Portrait of a Girl (Mark Gerder), 211
Portrait of a Man (Gilbert Spencer), 232
Post-Impressionism, 50, 51, 54, 61, 67, 68,
200, 249, 285
Post-Impressionists, 66, 67, 72
Post-Impressionist Exhibition, the First, 45,
49, 284
Post-Impressionist Exhibition, the Second,
50, 238
Pound, Ezra, 23, 28, 33, 3, 133. 147, 148,
150
Pound, Ezra, Head of (Wyndham Lewis), 36
Pound, Ezra, Portrait of (Wyndham Lewis),
3*
Poussin, 21, 85
Pre-Raphaelites, 71, 72, 105, 122, 131, 293
Promenade of Woman (Stanley Spencer),
188
Pryde, James, 264, 281
Puvis de Chavannes, 71
Pyramids in the Sea (Paul Nash), 99
Quarry, Llanelly, The (J. D. Innes), 64
Rabbi c
i and Rabbitzen (Mark Gertler), 210
Ramsden, E. H., 92, 107, 112, 279
Ranunculus (J. D. Innes), 69
Raphael, 21, 315
Read, Sir Herbert, 93, 100, 270-8, 319.
321
Reading Boy (Gilbert Spencer), 232
Rebel Art Centre, The, 2(5, 28, 29, 31, 132,
285
Reclining Figure (Henry Moore), 316
Red Portrait (Wyndham Lewis), 38
Red Nude (Wyndham Lewis), 35
Reid, McNeill, 91
Rembrandt, 78, 85, 95, 204, 208, 260, 325
Renoir, 123, 126, 182, 21 8
344
INDEX
Requiescat (Edward Wadsworth), 159
Resting (J. D. Innes), 65
Resurrection, Cookharn, The (Stanley Spencer)
165, i<56
Resurrection, Port Glasgow, The (Stanley
Spencer), 194, 195, 197
Resurrection: Raising of Jairus's Daughter
(Stanley Spencer), 194
Resurrection of Good and Bad, The (Stanley
Spencer), 174, 175
Resurrection of Soldiers, The (Stanley
Spencer), 183
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 56, 185
Richmond, Sir William, 97
Roads of France, Field Artillery and Infantry
(C. R. W. Nevinson), 144
Roberts, William, 28, 32, 33, 78, 98, 131,
133, 283-288, 336
Roberts, Winifred, 265
Rodin, 316
Roman Land, The (David Jones), 304
Rossetti, 81, 95, 96, 109, 113, 117, 131
Rothenstein, Lady (Elizabeth), 167, 168,
169, 170, 183, 1 86
Rothenstein, Sir William, 45, 59, 97, 99, 103,
207, 208, 216, 237, 240, 244, 253, 313,
314
Roundabout, The (Mark Gertler), 212
Rousseau, 30
Rousseau, Le Douanier, 266
Routiers, Les (William Roberts), 288
Rowlandson, 196
Roy, Pierre, 151, 162
Rubbo, Datillo, 248
Ruined Country, Old Battlefield, Vimy (Paul
Nash), 106
Ruskin, 18, 68, 71
Rutherston, Albert, 51, 334
Rutter, Frank, 129, 228, 231
uadler, Sir Michael, 140, 239, 312
SalfordArt Gallery, The (L. S. Lowry), 84
Sandys, Frederick, 293
Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors (Stanley
Spencer), 187, 188
Sargent, 52, 123
Sashes Meadow (Gilbert Spencer), 227
Sashes Meadow, Emmer Green (Gilbert
Spencer), 229
Saunders, Helen, 33
Savage, Reginald, 293
Schwabc, Randolph, 71, 73, 76
Scott, Geoffrey, 277
Seaport (Edward Wadsworth), 155
Seated Figure (Roy de Maistre), 257
Seated Figure (Henry Moore), 327
Seddon, Richard, 115
Self-Portraits (C. R, W. Nevinson), 146
Self-Portrait (Gilbert Spencer), 226
Self-Portrait (Stanley Spencer), 164
Self-Portrait (Edward Wadsworth), 149
Separating Fighting Swans (Stanley Spencer),
188
Sermon on the Mount, The (Gilbert Spencer),
227, 230
Seurat, 159, 255
Seven Ages of Man, The (Gilbert Spencer),
226
Seven and Five Society, The, 308
Severini, Gino, 129, 130, 132, 138
Shelter Drawings (Henry Moore), 323, 326,
3^7, 328
Shepherds Amazed, The (Gilbert Spencer),
226
Shipbuilding (Stanley Spencer), 193
Sickert, W. R., 54, 65, 78, 79, 119, 124, 140,
213, 237
Signac, 123
Simpson, Norah, 248
Sisley, 123
Sitwell, Edith, 38
Sitwell, Edith, Portrait of (Wyndham Lewis),
37
Sitwell, Sir Osbert, Bt, 144, 240
Sleeping Nude (Mark Gertler), 219
Smith, Sir Matthew, 60, 67, 124, 246, 283
Snow at Worming ford (John Nash), 243
SofBci, Ardengo, 120
'Song of Roland, The', 294
Sorel, Georges, 29
Spencer, Gilbert, 169, 224-233, 334, 336-
337
Spencer, Stanley, 98, 119, 124, 151, 164-
199, 201, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 246,
284, 334, 337
Spring at the Hawk's Wood (Paul Nash), 98
Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood (Paul
Nash), 106
St. Francis and the Birds (Stanley Spencer),
188
St. Ives (Ben Nicholson), 270
Standing Figures (Henry Moore), 325
Steer, P. W., 64, 65, 67, 78, 151, 211, cf.
Vol. I
Stephen, Adrian, 54
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 48
Stevens, Alfred, 283
Still Death (Edward Wadsworth), 149
Still-Life (Ben Nicholson), 270
Still-ltfe. (Edward Wadsworth), 162
Still-Life (Apples) (Duncan Grant), 50
Still-Life with Fruit (Ben Nicholson), 266
Stoll, Sir Oswald, 134
Stone Sea (Paul Nash), 112
Stour Valley (Gilbert Spencer), 229
Strachey, Lady, 47
Strachey, Lytton, 46, 47. 48, 53, 214, 215,
217
Streeton, Sir Arthur, 249, 252
Striped Jug, The (Ben Nicholson), 263, 264
Sullivan, J. W. N,, 17
INDEX
345
Summer (Gilbert Spencer), 225
Summerson, John, 264, 265, 2<56, 270
Sunrise, Inverness Copse (Paul Nash), 106
Surrealism, 23, m, 157
Surrender of Barcelona, The (Wyndham
Lewis), 37
Swan Upping (Stanley Spencer), 173, 175,
179
Sweeney, James Johnson, 311, 322, 323, 326
Swift, Jonathan, 21, 40
Sword oj 'the Lord and oj 'Gideon, The (Stanley
Spencer), 179
JL an-y-Grisiau (J. D. Innes), 69
Tan-y-Grisiau (J. D. Innes), 71
Tan-y-Grisiau: The Green Dress (J. D. Innes),
72
Teapot, The (Mark Gertler), 209
Tennyson, 95, 117
Terrace, The (David Jones), 304
Thames Regatta, A (C. R. W. Nevinson),
146
Thomas, Havard, 124
Thoreau, 191
Tlireshing (John Nash), 240
Titian, 85, 325
Tintoretto, 186
Tonks, Henry, 22, 64, 98, 124, 125, 226,
285
Totes Meer (Paul Nash), 108
Toulouse-Lautrec, 126, 127
Towednark (Ben Nicholson), 270
Travoys arriving with wounded at a Dressing
Station, Smol, Macedonia (Stanley
Spencer), 182
Trees in a Flood (John Nash), 239
Tribute Money, The (Masaccio), 225
Tub, The (Duncan Grant), 50
Turner, 56, 66, 151, 155, 234, 283, 324, 3^7
Twentieth Century, The (C, R. W. Nevin
son), 144
Two Girls and a Beehive (Stanley Spencer),
173
Two Seated Figures (Henry Moore), 325
Two Seated Women (Henry Moore), 325
Two Women (Henry Moore), 325
Two Women bathing a Baby (Henry Moore),
U<
/cccllo, 265
'Ulysses' (James Joyce), 20
Utrillo, 86
Van Gogh, 67, 123, 126, 129, 249, 283, 293,
312
Valette, Adolphe, 81
Velazquez, 85
Vermeer, 263, 264
Vexilta Regis Pavid Jones), 304
View from Cookham Bridge (Stanley Spencer),
186
Villagers and Saints (Stanley Spencer), iS8
'Vision and Design* (Fry), 313
Visitation, The (Stanley Spencer), 173
Vlaminck, Maurice de, 126, 302
Vorticism, 23, 24, 33, 78, 133, 135, 147, 148,
150, 151, 152, 153, 160, 265, 285, 286
Wadsworth, Edward, 24, 27, 28, 33, 78,
98, 100, 124, 131, 133, 147-163, 334,
337-338
Wakelin, R. S., 250, 251
Waterfall, The (]. D. Innes), 67
Watts, G. E, 17
Wellington, Hubert, 218
Wells, H. G., 17
West, Rebecca, 17, 33
What the Sea is like at Night (Wyndham
Lewis), 36
Whistler, 48, 54, 264
White Relief 1935 (Ben Nicholson), 280
Whitman, Walt, 95, 117
Wilde, Oscar, 131
Wilenski, R. H., 20
Winter Afternoon (John Nash), 243
Winter Sea (Paul Nash), 108
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 41
Wood, Christopher, 309
Wood, Derwent, 313
Wood of the Nightmares' Tails (Paul Nash),
112
Woolf, Virginia, 48
Wordsworth, 197
Workmen in the House (Stanley Spencer), 188
Worringer, Wilhelm, 29
Wye near Chepstow, The (J. D. Innes), 65
Wyndham, Richard, 157
Yeats, W. B,, 17
Young Girlhood (Mark Gertler), 219
acharias and Elizabeth (Stanley Spencer),
164, 174, 179, 186
Zadkine, Ossip, 155
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